


Object Lessons: Season 4

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Object Lessons [4]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Angst and Romance, Estrangement, F/M, Family, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Friendship/Love, Humor, Injury Recovery, Jealousy, Partners to Lovers, Physical Therapy, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Trauma, Reconciliation, Romance, Team as Family, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-12
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:02:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 23
Words: 22,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23114389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: I recently started rewatching Castle from the beginning, after taking time off after Dialogic. With Dialogic, I chose a line of dialogue from each episode to prompt the story. For these stories, I chose an object from the episode.Although I suppose in my mind these are "in continuity" with one another, one can certainly read them independent of one another.
Relationships: Javier Esposito/Lanie Parish, Jenny O'Malley/Kevin Ryan, Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Object Lessons [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622947
Comments: 10
Kudos: 15





	1. Imbrue—Rise (4 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The white gloves of her dress uniform aren’t white any more. Parade gloves. That’s what she’d told him they were called in an out-of-body moment as they waited for the casket to be ready for them to carry. Montgomery’s casket. The gloves are supposed to be white, but they aren’t any more. They’ve spattered with red from the moment she went down, the moment his body carried hers to the sun-warmed turf a few paces from an open grave. Montgomery’s grave. 

The white gloves of her dress uniform aren’t white any more. _Parade gloves._ That’s what she’d told him they were called in an out-of-body moment as they waited for the casket to be ready for them to carry. Montgomery’s casket. The gloves are supposed to be white, but they aren’t any more. They’ve spattered with red from the moment she went down, the moment his body carried hers to the sun-warmed turf a few paces from an open grave. Montgomery’s grave. 

_(Too late, too late, too late.)_

They’re underfoot now. They’ve been torn violently from her—everything in this careening metal box is violent—and now black slip-on shoes embroidered with a red caduceus trample them underfoot. Lanie’s bare feet trample them underfoot. The white gloves of her dress uniform are now grey and black and spattered with a red so dark he didn’t know it existed before now.

He is in the way. His body is too large and too clumsy. He wants to hold her hand. He has a notion that her hands must be cold without the gloves, without even that thin layer of cotton. Her skin was going cold already during the unimaginable expanse of time that unfolded before the ambulance got there.

The ambulance. He’s in the ambulance with her at least, but he has to stay out of the way. They tried to close the doors on her without him—with him on the wrong side of the doors—and he screamed. He had screamed at Lanie. She had hauled him up, inside, and slammed him into the sidewall. He has to stay out of the way. That’s the bargain he made.

Lanie’s gloves are not blue. The gloves of the EMT with the ridiculous caduceus shoes are not blue. Both—all four—are slick with a red that’s different from the one trampled underfoot. This red is bright. It belongs with the blazing blue sky and the lush green of the cemetery. But it’s here, instead, and there’s too much of it. It smells of salt and iron with a sick-making note of raw meat that roils beneath everything—alcohol, asphalt, and the rest.

There’s far too much of that bright red extending up Lanie’s arms, stippling the skin at the open throat of her black dress. _Exam gloves,_ he thinks. _Medical gloves, not crime scene,_ he thinks, _Context. Context._ Medical gloves that are not blue, and there’s a pair underfoot. There’s a trampled pair the EMT stripped off when they grew too slick with that bright red.

It’s an out of body moment again, and he sees his own head forcefully meet the ceiling from the vantage point of a spectator and the speeding ambulance jounces.There’s a lurid streak on the hospital tiles, then. There’s black in between. There is a shrieking, harrowing stretch of time where Lanie is huddled against him, out of the way while the EMT with his fresh gloves tries to make the shrieking stop. And then the lurid streak on hospital tiles.

It’s a disgusting, sinuous guide as he follows the gurney. The wheel—the one bad wheel—is somehow the one coated in that bright red going dark. He imagines that he’s seeing the change in real time—disjointed moments time-lapsed together. He remembers the parade gloves and understands time has passed—another unimaginable expanse and there are hospital tiles now. There is a lurid, sinus trail extending from Lanie, standing barefoot, into infinity.

She has nothing comforting to say. She is not screaming this time. She estimates how much—how much—bright red, dark red, how much of all of it. She says things he understands—through and through, left chest—and a host of things he doesn’t. She doesn’t scream. He doesn’t scream. They stand there on an arbitrary waypoint on that lurid streak on the hospital tiles, their part in this finished.

“I need to get cleaned up,” Lanie says when the well of medical jargon runs dry.

She is coping. She is trying to cope. She holds her not-blue hands away from her body and the overhead fluorescents turn the red into some unspeakable shade. She tries to peel the gloves off, but she’s shaking too hard.

“Let me—” His voice is startling to him.

He steps forward into a moment that feels out of sequence. He tries to help, but he’s shaking, too. Still, they make a go of it. They peel the gloves away, but they leave behind ghosts—pristine skin devoid of any kind of red like a photo negative. It draws a sob from her, something worse from him.

“You, too,” she manages through tears that have started again. “You need to get cleaned up.”

She nods down at his hands. They’re hanging uselessly by his sides. They’re smeared with the darkest red of all. He has half-moons of it under each and every fingernail. Across the back of his left hand is a slash of it like warpaint that leaps up to streak the face of his watch.

“It’s blood,” he says stupidly, but the images flash, one by one, though his mind. The gloves—bright red, dark, darkest—the smell, the lurid sinuous streak winding off into infinity along the hospital tiles, the places his clothes stick to his skin with something awful. “It’s all her blood.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well. That didn’t go where I wanted it to. Hmmm.


	2. Reciprocating—Heroes and Villains (4 x 02)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ann Hastings’ possessions don’t amount to much. There’s a cell phone, of course, and a single key on a nondescript ring. Kate smiles to herself as she sets it on the table. She hopes that it opens some kind of habitable place, rather than the dive that is the Lair of Lone Vengeance. There’s a tube of lipstick that strikes her as incongruous—not exactly an item found in the average superhero utility belt.

Ann Hastings’ possessions don’t amount to much. There’s a cell phone, of course, and a single key on a nondescript ring. Kate smiles to herself as she sets it on the table. She hopes that it opens some kind of habitable place, rather than the dive that is the Lair of Lone Vengeance. There’s a tube of lipstick that strikes her as incongruous—not exactly an item found in the average superhero utility belt.

She sets the lipstick aside and unzips a pouch small enough to stuff into even the useless pockets on most women’s clothing. There’s a little bit of cash inside, and the pouch’s three slots are occupied by a metro card, a credit card and a dry-cleaning ticket that must have been pink once. The color has faded into almost nothing. The paper is soft and almost edgeless with handling.

_A dry-cleaning ticket._

It’s sobering. And it’s unnerving to think that it must be the young woman’s last connection to her father.

The fingers of Kate’s right hand go instinctively for the reassuring feel of her dad’s watch. Her thumb brushes over the comfortable bump where the leather gives easily when she fastens the buckle each morning. She gives the crown an emphatic spin and rests her palm over the face for the soothing haptic sensation of the steady _tick, tick, tick._

She’s glad of the watch, glad of the life she saved, but it’s her mother’s ring she misses. She doesn’t have it with her today. She hasn’t had it with her since her first day back, when the chain got knotted and kinked in her pocket. She hasn’t had it with her most days for a while. A while. 

She got Dick Coonan’s blood on it. That was awful, but that’s not what made the difference. The odd thing is she’s not sure what _did_ make the difference. But she hung it up one day. In the summer—the last one, not this one. She hung it up and almost never wore it anymore. She almost never had it with her.

It has something to do with failing. Something to do with the truth she’s only just spoken lately—to him, of course. She is not whole, not reconciled to the life she lost, and the calculus behind the ring—wearing it, not wearing it, having it with her or not—has only gotten more complicated lately. 

She hates the thought of it resting over her scar. As her hands work to restore order to Ann Hastings’ possessions, she owns the petty truth of it—she hates the idea of her mother’s ring coming anywhere near the pink, puckered, damnably itchy, painful, hideous scar. Her chin drops to her chest. Her hands go still. She’s preemptively tired at the thought of talking it through with Burke, baring yet another wounded part of her soul.

The clang of the holding cell cage rouses her from her reverie. She straightens her shoulders and gives Velazquez a grateful nod for making quick work of Hastings’ release and the restoration of her personal effects. She stands face to face with the young woman in question and the air is thick between them with the ways their lives intersect and diverge.

Kate notices for the first time the prominent scar running down Hastings’ chest from the notch between her collar bones down her sternum, disappearing beneath the neckline of her shirt. It’s an old scar, nearly the same color as the rest of Hastings’ skin. It’s nothing like the angry jigsaw of her own torso, but it’s there. It is as healed as it will ever be. The idea is as sobering to Kate as it is reassuring, but she sets it aside.

She casts a glance over her shoulder and sees Paul Whittaker, hopeful, relieved, in love. She sees Castle standing just beyond him looking … much the same. Her heart pounds at the thought of it. It positively gallops with fierce intention, but she has something to say to Ann Hastings.

She has something to say about worn dry-cleaning tickets and rings shuttered away because she’s certain that she has failed. She’s failed. She has something to say about what the two of them owe the dead, as survivors, as people whose lives have been so profoundly shaped by loss.

_Don’t be so driven by the past that you throw away your future._

Hastings hears her. She gives her a short nod and a sharp look with a challenge in it. She glances over Kate’s shoulder, and Kate knows exactly what—exactly who—the young woman is seeing. And when she steps on the elevator and kisses Paul Whittaker for all she’s worth, she knows—Kate knows—that Ann Hastings has something to say to her.   
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Well … the object is not squishy? Hmmm.


	3. Integral—Head Case (4 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time, he killed an hour or two—and an unspecified number of brain cells—at hotel bar in Nashville. He and a would-be songwriter occupied adjacent stools and intermittently chatted and left one another to silently contemplate the world through the bottom of their respective rocks glasses. He’d been casting about blindly for an idea that didn’t utterly bore him, she’d laughed and told him she’d kill for such luxury—she’d been writing to titles on demand, most recently to the title, “There Are Pieces of You (All Over the Place).”

Once upon a time, he killed an hour or two—and an unspecified number of brain cells—at hotel bar in Nashville. He and a would-be songwriter occupied adjacent stools and intermittently chatted and left one another to silently contemplate the world through the bottom of their respective rocks glasses. He’d been casting about blindly for an idea that didn’t utterly bore him, she’d laughed and told him she’d kill for such luxury—she’d been writing to titles on demand, most recently to the title, “There Are Pieces of You (All Over the Place).”

And thus, lightning struck.

He’d picked up her tab, inclusive through the end of the night, and immediately pushed back from the bar to start working on the plot that had landed, fully formed, square in the middle of his head before she’d finished the parenthetical. He’d wound up mostly writing away the gruesome dismemberment.

He’d reunited toes and foot, fingers and hand, thinking it was all simply too much, and if that, then why not entire limbs? Next he’d realized, the Black Dahlia murder not withstanding, that separating torso from abdomen was both time consuming and messy, to say nothing of the glut of unnecessary trace evidence it created. In the end his victim suffered nothing more than a particularly vigorous throat slashing, but there’d have been no victim, no plot, no eventual book that didn’t entirely bore him, without that hotel bar.

The murder of Lester Hamilton has him, if not reliving the glory days of well and truly dismembering a potential victim for possibly inclusion in _Frozen Heat,_ then at least whistling an imaginary tune to go with the killer title. There’s Lester’s blood (except where Lester’s blood isn’t), and then there’s Lester’s headless body. There’s Lester’s bodiless head (and there’s only that, because there was Lester’s brain matter where it ought not to have been). If it weren’t so grisly—if it weren’t ultimately such a romantic tragedy—it could totally be a breakaway hit as a French farce.

But it _is_ a romantic tragedy. He thinks so, anyway, and as much as he’d like to sequester himself and refresh his own memory of the vocabulary dear to reducing a human body to its most basic components, he has his mind on the present, not the past. He’s dwelling in the astonishingly open way she declared Cynthia Hamilton’s actions to be a crime of love, the clear, quiet hope in her voice when she said that she and Lester would find their way back to one another in some hereafter. He’s dwelling on the heart and the head.

It’s the essence of the conflict, her and everywhere. The killing damage to Lester’s heart, when he let his head take precedence, literally and metaphorically. The question of whether Cynthia was insane, in love, or both—whether she was right that Lester, with a tumor ravaging his brain, could possibly have been in his right mind. It’s one hell of a plot and a convenient distraction for his own head at the moment, a convenient excuse to consider where the line between love and madness lies for someone else entirely.

He is, by nature, hopeful. His heart gravitates toward tidbits like the fact that she didn’t bat an eye when he boldly brought up how things between them will be ten years from now. It brushes aside all the eye rolls and impatient barbs and offers up as memory the smile that says she’s not that happy at the thought of doing without him for a few hours. 

And he is, by long habit, a risk taker. A taker of certain kinds of risks, anyway. He snowboards and sky dives and bungee jumps at the drop of a hat. He devours roller coasters and has flouted every custom, written and unwritten rule, and more than his fair share of less serious laws. Hell, every day he works with her—not to mention Lanie and now Gates—is a day that there might be Pieces of Him (All Over the Place).

But she— _this_ —is not the kind of risk he takes.

She left him for months, and before that—before Montgomery and everything—she’d pulled the ripcord. _And what about you, Rick?_ she’d asked and the trap was set. If he’d told her then she’d have run screaming. Or told him point blank that she didn’t believe him. Or pushed him out the window. Or thrown him to the floor and taken him in front of Buddha and everyone.

Okay, so he really has no idea what she would have done if he’d told her then, though that last one is probably a long shot, unfortunately.

But she left him for months. That’s certainly true, and he’s still angry. He still thinks he ought to frame that rejection and hang it on the wall somehow. But more than angry, far more, he’s … afraid. His head would like a higher-rent word there—terrified, paralyzed, _petrified_ —but the truth is, he’s simply afraid.

It makes his head loud. It gives free rein to all the very practical reasons this is not the kind of risk he takes. It shouts—a lot—about the fact that she never actually _said_ that he’s the kind of relationship she wants. His very loud head is pretty sure that everything his heart heard between the lines is, in fact, a _Three’s Company_ -level wacky misunderstanding. And— _and_ —his very loud head hastens to add, even if it’s not, he himself with the secrets he’s keeping that is standing between her and the primary obstacle to the kind of relationship she wants to have, quite possibly with someone who is not him.

It tells him, loudly and persistently, that to risk this is well over the line into madness.

But for all that, his heart gravitates toward the quiet hope and the quick, bashful looks. It stores up the kindnesses and the moments she’s possessive, protective, _partial_ to him.   
  
For all that, his heart is winning.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: OMG. I swear I will stop writing about bodies and body parts some time. But I really do know a person who spent some time in Nashville who was asked to write that song. Hmmm.


	4. Atlas—Kick the Ballistics (4 x 04)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That sugar bowl weighs a ton, but she picks it up anyway. She sets it down and speaks gently, but not too gently, to Ryan. They’re both cops, after all, and there are rules to observe, even with Ryan. Especially with Ryan, who has just as much of the job’s non-negotiable baggage as any one of them does, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. You usually wouldn’t know it, but today—this, every day stretching back not quite a year—is hard on him. So she says her piece. She hears him out. She picks up the sugar bowl, even though it weighs a ton.

That sugar bowl weighs a ton, but she picks it up anyway. She sets it down and speaks gently, but not too gently, to Ryan. They’re both cops, after all, and there are rules to observe, even with Ryan. Especially with Ryan, who has just as much of the job’s non-negotiable baggage as any one of them does, though you wouldn’t know it to look at him. You usually wouldn’t know it, but today—this, every day stretching back not quite a year—is hard on him. So she says her piece. She hears him out. She picks up the sugar bowl, even though it weighs a ton.

The words do, too. Not just with Ryan. Not even _mostly_ with Ryan, but with him. Castle. Because this is hard on him, too, in ways she can’t really understand, and she says the wrong thing at first. She’s sharp and unthinking, because she’s out of practice, because she can barely handle one trauma at a time, because she made the grievous error of moving like a normal person to take the cup of coffee out of his hand this morning and everything kind of hurts today. And she dismisses him.

_It’s a cop thing._

She didn’t mean it like that, but she said it. The wrong thing, and the words weigh on her all day.

She’s screwing up a lot. Not at the job, so much, though she’s considered burning down the whole station before word of her uncharacteristic assault on a computer cart—which, by the way, doesn’t exactly help on the _everything hurts_ front—can make it off the fourth floor. But other than rubbing Gates the wrong way, and who doesn’t rub Gate the wrong way, since those first shaky few days back, it’s not the job that’s the problem. 

It’s life she’s screwing up at every turn. It’s being a colleague, a friend, a partner, she’s forgotten how to do, and everything constantly feels like it weighs a ton, even though she’s working on it. She’s working on it, and that’s the irony.

She does the job, and before the job, after the job, sometimes right in the middle of the job, she does the work so she doesn’t keep screwing up life. She goes to physical therapy so everything doesn’t hurt all the time—so she’s less inclined to be sharp and unthinking because she’s in pain.

She goes to _therapy_ therapy, so that she’s up for emotional labor that now seems to come with getting out the damned door every day, and it is _exhausting._ Finding her own boundaries and evaluating them—figuring out what’s reasonable and what’s an artifact of her mother’s death—it’s all so _taxing_ that everything feels like it weighs a ton and she has absolutely no energy left not to screw up at life.

She goes to therapy to figure it out, and she has absolutely no energy left to cope with the calls and invitations from Lanie, from her dad, from the boys. From Castle, though there have not been many from that quarter. Not many at all, and that stands in for the rest of it. She has amends to make, and she knows that. Not that anyone is asking her to—not that even he has not set the months of silence aside with considerably more grace than she thinks she deserves a lot of the time—but it’s part of the weight anyhow, if only because it’s another task. It’s another few feet of the hole she has to drag herself up and out of with the weight of all that on her back.

That—all of that—is why she thinks the drink will weigh a ton, too. When Ben Lee departs and the bottle comes out, she has to plant her feet at the sight of the clear plastic cups that Castle surreptitiously deals out. She has to remind herself that this is the work, too—being present for these people who mean the world to her, hefting sugar bowls and moving words around the world. So she plants her feet.

She joins in the game of _Don’t tell mom_ and adds her voice to the chorus of each toast with a smile. And she finds it’s not so heavy, maybe because they’re all feeling a little quiet. Maybe because they’re sharing the weight and she’s gotten a little practice in lately.

The moment ends before too long. She’s glad of that, however heavy that drink wasn’t. She’s still glad that Ryan is eager to get home to Jenny and that’s an obvious cue for them to go their separate ways.

She finds she’s just as glad, though, that Castle lingers a little. He waves to Esposito and Ryan as the elevator doors close and he’s shuffling his feet. He’s making a great show of checking his phone. He’s waiting around to walk out with her, and she’s genuinely glad for the silly, gallant way he ushers her into the elevator and the way he turns to make conversation out on the street in front of the precinct.

“I don’t suppose,” he begins boldly, but his courage fades fast. It ends in a question. “You’re up for a drink? Like, with real glasses?”

“I’m not tonight, Castle,” she says, surprised to find that the admission feels simple. That words feel … easy. “Everything”—she brings the heel of her hand to her sterum—“everything just kind of hurts today. It takes it out of me.” 

“I’m sorry,” he says, and there’s no weight to it. It just means what it means, and that’s a _relief._ “Another—”

“Soon,” she cuts in quickly. “Some night soon. A drink with real glasses.”

“Okay.” He smiles a funny, pleased little smile. It’s not the dazzling thing it might have been a few months ago, but this feels right for the moment. “That’d be good.”

“Yeah.” She matches the smile, funny for funny, pleased for pleased. “It will be.”  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: That nine-pound sugar bowl, man. Hmmm.


	5. Idée Fixe—Eye of the Beholder (4 x 05)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d be the first to admit that he’s a showman. He likes to be the center of attention. There’s just rarely any need for him to admit it, what with his mother, his kid, and in no particular order, Beckett, Lanie, Ryan, Esposito, and most uniformed and plainclothes personnel operation of the NYPD’s twelfth precinct—with the exception of Captain Gates, who despises him too completely to have notice—lining up to point out that he likes to be the center of attention.

He’d be the first to admit that he’s a showman. He likes to be the center of attention. There’s just rarely any need for him to admit it, what with his mother, his kid, and in no particular order, Beckett, Lanie, Ryan, Esposito, and most uniformed and plainclothes personnel operation of the NYPD’s twelfth precinct—with the exception of Captain Gates, who despises him too completely to have notice—lining up to point out that he likes to be the center of attention.

But it turns out that his mother’s out-of-the-blue concern for his social calendar was an omen. What started out as a passing encounter with Serena Kaye, coupled with the _lagniappe_ of a little healthy tweaking of Beckett’s professional and not-so-professional jealousy, has taken an unexpected turn for the dangerous. By ten am, he finds himself suddenly up to some very vulnerable bits in attention from the fairer sex, and it’s enough to make WitSec sound relaxing.

The danger is maybe, possibly, if you squint at it, just the tiniest bit his fault. Serena has been coming on strong from the get go, to say the least, and letting that roll—trotting off after her with a merry _I’m not a cop, either_ —is on the childish side. Which is strange, because nothing that’s on Serena Kaye’s mind is at all family friendly. But landing a role in _Ms. Kaye’s Special Grown-Up Time_ isn’t really what tempts him. Okay. It is not what primarily tempts him.

The work, as she describes it—and for once, something is almost entirely as advertised—sounds fun. It’s exactly like police work, but with none of the annoying rules and waiting around for things. Which, upon reflection, makes it almost exactly _un_ like police work.

It’s a thrill traveling in Serena’s wake, strolling into a bar that manages to be high end and seedy at the same time. It’s exciting to watch as she brings her assets to bear on skeevy informants—something he’s seen Beckett do only on exceedingly rare and honestly upsetting occasions—is legitimately fascinating. It makes his fingers itch, and as the day wears on, he hopes they let him bring a laptop into WitSec, because he has a zillion new ideas. 

But the work isn’t the only thing that tempts him, either.

He … wants to see what Beckett will do. It rockets to first place on the list of the top one thousand stupidest things he has done in at least two calendar years, but it’s true. He wants to know that her not-so-professional jealousy is in play here, too. He wants to see if that might shake a little brick and mortar loose in that wall of hers.

It’s not his finest hour for a host of reasons, the simplest of which is Serena’s frank and unmistakeable interest deserves an answer in kind. He recovers a little on that front when it turns out to be, at the very least, not entirely frank. But still, just because someone’s a liar and a thief and more than likely a murderer, there’s no excuse for using someone like that. He should know, used as he is—well and truly _pressed_ as Beckett’s one advantage and relegated to the role of rodeo clown for his perceived sins.

But he doesn’t know what those sins are, because in the grand tradition of stupid moves throughout time, his has backfired, hasn’t it?

He wanted to see what Beckett would do, and she’s told him to suit himself. She’s sent him on a damned date with the woman whose unwavering attention and unabashed flirting was supposed to stoke the fires of jealousy. So, yeah, you could call that a backfire. 

Except she leads with _theft_ when she arrests Serena, and _murder,_ for the first time since he’s known her, is a lagging afterthought. She looks at him like she’s preparing to remove Serena’s lipstick from his skin with some of Perlmutter’s extra special cleaning solution. She hisses the most absurd things at him all night long, but the past forty-eight hours have him so turned around and mad that he can’t tell if she’s jealous, or she just thinks he’s that big an idiot. He really hopes he can get into WitSec on the strength of his personal essay.

But until that comes through, the women in his life have him so worn out that he doesn’t even want to take a victory lap—much—when he turns out to have been right about Serena all along. He just wants every one to live through Serena’s exit from the scene in the not too distant future, so he does what he does best—he caffeinates them both, or tries to, anyway.

Beckett makes herself scarce, with her head down and her shoulders curled in on themselves and he doesn’t know how to feel. He doesn’t know if she doesn’t care, if she did care and she’s just surrendering that easily, or if—and here’s a concept that that makes him want to forget WitSec and find a volcano to jump into—things are exactly as she told them they were and she needs to focus on _healing_ from the trauma of her mother’s murder, not just hiding from it.

He’s pondering that when Serena makes herself scarce, but not before delivering the trenchant observation that he belongs to her—to Kate—whether she’s ready for that or not. He hardly has time to process it. He has no time at all to feel lonely before she’s back. Kate is back, and there’s really no mistaking the fact that she looks like a kid on Christmas morning when she realizes that he’s still there and Serena Kaye is not.

There’s really no mistaking it, but just in case, she asks him out. She takes him out, and for the space of a few hours, he thinks WitSec can wait. He’s the absolute center of her attention. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The man, the myth, the object. Hmmm.


	6. Revenant—Demons (4 x 6)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everything seems to be about memory, lately. Or maybe that’s just her rampantly projecting. It might be a little of both.

Everything seems to be about memory, lately. Or maybe that’s just her rampantly projecting. It might be a little of both.

It starts with Castle’s historical murder board. That gets to her more than she’d like to let on, so she spins it away like she objects because it’s nothing but one of his flights of fancy and, as such, a waste of her time. But those eight victims, each one forgotten, but for a few inches of newspaper column he had to go hunting for, they get to her, lined up in two neat rows like that.

When he’s gone—when he and Ryan are off on their Scooby Gang errand—she sneaks out of the break room after yet another debacle with the damned espresso machine and spins the board back around. She stands there and reads each name over, once in his handwriting, with cause of death gleefully picked out in contrasting marker below it, and once in the blurry newspaper copy. She scans the columns for details, for who these people were before they were victims.

She stands and takes in the whole board, with a vague sense of unease and a half-remembered quote nagging at the back of her mind about death coming when the last person who remembers us passes on. She knows the realities of this work as well as any homicide cop. She knows that it’s not simply the John Raglans of the world that fill up a board like this, but she can’t help feeling that her brothers and sisters in blue fell down on the job of carrying these people in their memories. And as she stands and stares until Esposito catches her there with burned fingertips and and an offending pitcher of inexpertly steamed milk clutched in her hand, she feels a rolling wave of unease on the subject of memory that blends the personal with the professional. 

Jack Sinclair gets to her, too, of course. Sitting in Mercy LaGrande’s uncomfortable chairs, with Castle close enough—damnably perceptive enough—to read her every voluntary and involuntary reaction, she receives a terrifying jolt as the story comes together. Dreams to nightmares to a memory recovered in the last minutes of his life. In the moment, she’s almost too paralyzed—too afraid of being caught in the lies she’s been telling—to speak.

The guilt for that comes later. It comes with a wave of empathy, preoccupation with the host of details that seem endlessly poignant—a childhood newspaper route. A chance encounter and a trauma that must have shaped his life so profoundly without the man having even realized it. No one wakes up one morning and decides to be a ghost hunter—unless, possibly, they are a millionaire mystery writer and overgrown child—without something fairly disturbing bubbling beneath the surface.

She thinks—she knows—there’s a lesson there. She’s been trying hard to learn it with Burke, the difference between dealing with memory and denying it, and it feels for damned sure like feigning repression of the memory of her most recent trauma isn’t on that curriculum.

Pete Benton probably should be on that curriculum. He delivers what feels like a crushing blow _… it’s burned into your brain… . I couldn’t forget it if I tried._ She feels her eyes flutter closed and the weight of her chin as it drops to her chest as the awareness washes over her, far from the first time, that the words—the cruel reality—applies equally to the two them.

She folds her arms tightly across her chest to hide her shaking hands, but Castle has already noticed. He casts a worried, sideways glance that hits her like a blow as he fields Benton’s question about the apparently shocking news of his brother’s innocence. He propels the conversation forward until they exit the office with an actual lead, rather than her in a heap on the floor.

He tries to ask her about it. He tries to see if she’s ok once they’re down on the street. His mouth opens, and without really meaning to, she lifts her eyes to his in a pleading glance. She shakes her head, a tiny gesture. He catches his breath. He bites his tongue. He nods, tinier still, and she makes a promise to herself that before the day is out she’ll say … something. Not everything, but something.

It’s inclined to slip away from her, though. Like all good intentions, maybe, it’s inclined to slip away, because they’re teasing each other in the end. They’re challenging and dragging concessions from one another and the present seems like a better note to end on.

But she catches a glimpse of the board—his board on the back the real board she’s too tired to take down tonight—just as the elevator doors bump closed. It makes her quiet as the car glides downward. He’s too animated about the mysterious force that lit up the elevator button to notice, and there’s a last pulse of temptation to let it go. To not say a thing, but she promised herself.

“Castle.” It comes out so quietly that she’s afraid he hasn’t heard, but there’s something urgent beneath it. He quiets, too, immediately. “Thanks for before. At Pete Benton’s.” She chews the corner of he lip. “And at Mercy’s. For picking things up.”

“Sure,” he says, puzzled. “Of course.”

“All the stuff about memory. Jack’s.” She’s stumbling. She’s making a mess of this and drawing far too close to more than she’s ready for. She takes a deep breath and tries for as much honesty as she can manage tonight. “It … caught me off guard.”

“I know.” He pulls himself up short. “I mean, I don’t _know,_ I can’t even imagine, but …” 

“You can—”

She thinks about it. There’s some scratching and clawing inside her, because he can, but he can’t. Just as she can, but can’t, know what it’s like to carry his memories. The sheer fucking complexity of it stalls her out.

“Some things that are better not being remembered.”

He says it so softly, she’s not even sure he knows he said it aloud. She’s sure he didn’t mean to.

“I don’t think that’s true.” The words come to her slowly. “Not any more.” His head snaps up in surprise. “I think … it’s hard sometimes. It’s really hard. But it’s better to remember and live with things.” It’s all she can do not to stammer, all she can do to meet his eyes when she knows she’s tells from head to toe. “It’s better to try.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I am a sucker for the spinny double-sided board, for Ryan’s tinier “Galaxy of Greg” board, for competing boards. Hmmm.


	7. Dispatch—Cops and Robbers (4 x07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The sad, pen-less chain moored to the laminate-topped bank table evokes a little bit of melancholy in him. And a little bit of panic. He hates—positively hates—when writing implements are not where he expects them to be. And who runs off with crappy bank pens anyway? There’s a question with a chewy tragedy center—a poor, starving writer who loses the central theme of his great insert-nationality-here novel, all for want of a shitty bank pen.

The sad, pen-less chain moored to the laminate-topped bank table evokes a little bit of melancholy in him. And a little bit of panic. He hates—positively _hates_ —when writing implements are not where he expects them to be. And who runs off with crappy bank pens anyway? There’s a question with a chewy tragedy center—a poor, starving writer who loses the central theme of his great insert-nationality-here novel, all for want of a shitty bank pen.

The idea amuses him as much as it makes him a little twitchy and sad, which—altogether—is quite the windfall for him at the moment. Because his mother is never, ever going to be done with this ludicrous loan business, and given the positively Tolstoyan amounts of time he now has on his hands, he has big plans for distracting Beckett from her paperwork and keeping her on the phone.

Except apparently he doesn’t need to keep her on the phone, because his phone just met an untimely end, and now he’s going to die in a bank robbery.

From the first, he is not a fan of the whole thing, for both obvious and not-so-obvious reasons. He’s certainly not signing up to die, to watch his mother die, to watch a dozen innocent people die. Any-minute-now death gets a one-star review from him, for sure. But very nearly as bad is the fact that everything about the whole standoff is weird and wrong and he is epically, metaphorically without a pen.

He misses Beckett. It’s simultaneously the strangest and the most predictable thing in the world, but he _really_ misses her. She would have excellent ideas about what to do. And also very bad, very direct and Kantian _this is what one should do in all bad-guy-involved situations, forever and ever, Amen_ ideas, even though there are four of them and there’s something weird going on, which he would argue required some contextual thought and action.

And they’d be arguing about it right now, and he wouldn’t be scared out of his mind. Well, he would be, but he wouldn’t be missing her. He wouldn’t be feeling like he alone needs to be the one to figure something out to keep everyone from dying, and how is he supposed to do that anyway when someone has stolen all the sad little pens on sad little chains?

But it _is_ what he has to do. He sees from early on that has to do something to counteract Abe’s fatalism and Sal’s obvious panic-driven, shit-stirring tendencies. So he chases the story. He picks at the loose thread of Huxtable going for the bank manager’s safe deposit box key, and writes the scene in his head—pretext, investigation, next clue. And when the next clue looks like it’s managed to dead end him, it’s over to her.

He needs a moment when the Morse Code inspiration strikes. He needs a fucking moment, because he’s sitting on the floor of a bank and he knows she knows Morse Code, and he knows she doesn’t know that _he_ knows Morse Code. She doesn’t know that he holed up for a day the summer before last when he was pissed at Gina and Gina was pissed at him, and he taught himself, because he’d missed her then, too, and he’d felt stupid about the treasure map. He needs a moment, because he might die—they all might die—and he still has so many stories to tell her.

But right now, he he has to figure out how to send the shortest message possible with the most information packed into it. So that’s what he does. He repeats the same three letters, the same three numbers, over and over, and he has no way of knowing if she’s even seeing it, let alone able to do anything useful with the information.

And then there’s the C4—a new and exciting way they might all die sooner, rather than later, and the thought of Alexis finally intrudes. It’s been pressing at the edges of his heart and mind all along, but Sal’s near-hysterics, his mother’s sharp rejoinder, the _n_ th-level horror of Simone, the mother-to-be pressing her palm to the swell of her belly—they come together and make quick work of what little mental shield he’d had against the thought of both he and his mother being suddenly gone from her life.

It’s another call to action. He has another piece of the story, and metaphorical pen or no metaphorical pen, he has to get it to Beckett. But Sal throws a wrench into the works, yet again. It seems that way, but then there she is, the goddess in the machine. She’s written her own entrance, and he is transfixed.

Every story he has to tell her is written on his face as he kneels there beside a man he hardly knows. She is the picture of sharp vigilance. She takes in every detail as the fake doctors kick her feet apart and pat her down. The strange, startling action jolts him back into awareness. He makes a dive for another laminated bank table with its merciful supply of paper and its sad, dangling, pen-less chains.

He has a literal pen, of course. He has a minimum of _four_ literal pens on him at any given moment. and he scribbles all he can risk on the back of the deposit slip. He folds the message as tightly as he can, and suddenly she’s beside him. He shakes himself. She’s writing this part, and he thinks he’s fallen behind. He studies her paramedic get-up and readies himself for whatever move she’ll make—he eyes the scissors at her belt, the stethoscope. He tries to envision what use he’ll make of whatever advantage she tries to give him.

He’s so fixed on the idea of a weapon, a distraction, an insane, but undeniably badass, unarmed, two-against-four assault that he almost misses it. Her hand covers his. The touch jolts through him. It snaps his attention to her—to _her—_ and he understands now what it is she’s giving him.

Words. Of course it’s words and how on earth can it be words? It’s simultaneously the strangest and the most predictable thing in the world, this role reversal in a moment like this. Of course she’d give him words.

_Just keep breathing. I promise you I will get you out of here._

And he does.

And she does. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: That bank pen chain. It’s like an untied shoe, or a TV woman who doesn’t pull her hair out of her coat IMMEDIATELY after she puts it on. Hmmm.


	8. Correspondent—Heartbreak Hotel (4 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For someone so quick to abandon his post beside her desk in favor of an all-boys jaunt to Atlantic City, he sure seems to miss New York. They can’t even be out of Manhattan—hell she’s not even sure they can be out of the parking garage—when the first text comes through. 

For someone so quick to abandon his post beside her desk in favor of an all-boys jaunt to Atlantic City, he sure seems to miss New York. They can’t even be out of Manhattan—hell she’s not even sure they can be out of the parking garage—when the first text comes through. 

_Called shotgun, fair and square. Ryan sulking._

He provides visual evidence, a surreptitious over-the-shoulder shot of Ryan looking far from his usually cheerful self in the middle of the back seat. She laughs, even though she’s kind of annoyed with him. She’s kind of annoyed with the way Gates, for absolutely no good reason, has engineered this one-on-one quality time for the two of them, and the Captain herself manages to catch her doing something in between smiling and frowning down at her phone.

“Anything, Detective?” She says pointedly from the doorway to her office.

“Nothing yet, Sir,” Kate pockets the phone and throws herself into the paperwork she’s gathered on the Queens property.

The phone buzzes with impressive regularity. She limits herself to a glance every fifteen minutes or so, and tells herself it’s to affirm that there’s nothing actually case related that’s gotten caught up in his stream of consciousness.

She wades through seven different texts about Ryan’s best man tragedy. In the space of another fourteen texts, he provides what is probably not a final tally of the number of times the boys have told one another, in no uncertain terms, that this _sucks,_ as well as a large number of choice details from the would-have-been bachelor party he and Esposito would have thrown. Pyrotechnics are at least as prominent a feature as alcohol, nudity, and poor life choices.

 _I’m_ working, _you know,_ she finally raps out.

 _So are we,_ he shoots back immediately. Thirty seconds later, there’s a motion sickness–inducing video with the radio turned up loud. Sound blasts from her phone and she almost destroys it with a paper weight for fear that it’ll draw Gates from her lair, but the Captain is engrossed with something on her computer and the door is shut tight. She braces the phone on her lap and thumbs the volume way down before she hits play again and is greeted by Ryan and Esposito harmonizing in falsetto. It ends with a close-up of Castle’s face as he shakes his head in disbelief.

It’s Velazquez who catches her this time, nearly making her jump out of her skin. She’s got a sheet full of places Ralph Marino isn’t and not much else. She gives Kate a grin that says she most definitely saw Castle’s giant, goofy face on the screen, and that’s quite enough of that. The phone goes into a desk drawer and she pretends she can’t feel it buzzing through the chipped laminate top.

She turns her full attention to a bunch of rather useless information. Or, rather, she would turn her full attention to it if it weren’t for the fact that there’s something wrong with the elevator doors. There’s this completely aggravating _squeeeeaaal_ every time they try to close. She pictures him plastered against the silver, prying them open to shoulder his way in with the boys, and decides that it’s definitely time for a break to tell him that he’s in absolutely enormous trouble once Gates finally notices.

But there’s a text from Ryan about Marino’s cousin, and an actually useful text from him about Sam’s tendency to ask other men’s girlfriends to “blow on his dice,” notably and recently Marino’s girlfriend. With a potential motive and a lead in her back pocket, she feels more kindly disposed to her wayward boys, especially as the blow-by-blow text barrage tapers off into occasional bursts as he gets excited about the casino’s facial recognition software, and all the plot potential of constant and total surveillance.

He, of course, has to shared about the masseuse being absolutely sure that Sam's hands were definitely _occupied_ at the time of the money transfer that she uncovered, thank you very much. He sends a picture of the three of them huddled up doing _Home Alone_ faces with that and she’s back to hating them all a little bit.

He goes radio silent once they get themselves turfed from the casino. They _all_ go radio silent, and the sudden absence of the regular buzz is unnerving as she speeds along as fast as she dares. Given the number of dangerous individuals they’re potentially running afoul of, unnerved gives way to alarm, gives way to utter disbelief as she pulls up to the scene in front of the Sapphire—Ryan and Esposito, dazzling in white sequins, ultimately framing him, resplendent in black, with a Sunkist-orange scarf tossed jauntily around his neck. 

He gives it to her, that eye-searing scarf, when they’ve solved their case, save for the confession she’ll secure in the morning, provided her poking around yields what she thinks it will. She’s given the three of them a taste of the crap that their costumed hijinks have them in for when they’re back at work.

She’s made them squirm a minute, then cracks a smile and tells them to take the day for Ryan’s bachelor party. The groom-to-be and Esposito dash off to get Nadine’s recommendations like two kids who’ve just been given two rolls of quarters to blow, unsupervised, at the arcade. That leaves the two of them standing in the Sapphire’s lobby, staring at their respective shoes.

“You’re not staying?” He can’t seem to help asking, even though it seems like the question confuses him as much as it does her. 

“For pyrotechnics and nudity?” She laughs. “No, Castle.”

“Right. No.” He looks up at her. “It would be weird, right?” He frowns like he’s working through some particularly difficult math. “It would be weird.”

“Definitely weird.” she agrees. That about covers it, and she should be hitting the road. She’s not hitting the road.

“Ooh.” He brightens. “You could go to Alexis’s party. I hear it’s turned into a rager.” It’s her turn to frown as she tries to work out the math. “Doorman gave me the heads up. He’s known her since she was, like, seven. He’ll keep an eye out.”

“No parties for me.” She shakes her head. “Gotta put a bow on the case.” She allows herself a glare. “You know, without my team. Because they’ll be here, partying.”

“A bow!” He gets a sudden idea. He swings the garment bag he’s had slung over his shoulder around to the front of his body. He struggles with the zipper, then produces the scarf with a flourish. “You should have this.” He steps close and tries to drape it around her neck. She bats it away, laughing. “A party favor.”

“You want to do me a favor?” She wards off the scarf. “No texts, no pictures. None.”

He gives her a long look, like the idea pains him. He dangles the scarf and she gives in. She snatches it from him and lets it wind around her arm a few times.

“None,” he agrees.

He’s as good as his word, for a little while at least. She’s most of the way back to Manhattan before she pulls off for a coffee and a stretch. With perfect timing, the phone buzzes. She glances at the screen to see Ryan smiling dopily into some kind of lilac martini. He looks like he’s half asleep already. The phone buzzes again and there’s a shot of Esposito clearly embroiled in a passionate conversation with the guy to his right. One final buzz and it’s a picture of him, rolling his eyes, shaking his head, and the text below: _Wish you were here.  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Beckett’s pretty preoccupied with her phone. Hmmm. 
> 
> This’ll be the last story for a while. Need a pause.


	9. Headspace—Kill Shot (4 x09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is a visual person. It’s strange how many people are surprised by that. They hear writer and think he must be fundamentally turned inward at all times. They imagine that he can’t make sense of any experience without a pen in his hand or a keyboard at his fingertips.

He is a visual person. It’s strange how many people are surprised by that. They hear writer and think he must be fundamentally turned inward at all times. They imagine that he can’t make sense of any experience without a pen in his hand or a keyboard at his fingertips.

It’s true that words and pictures go together for him—they come together in every sense of the phrase. When he sees something striking, he has a pressing need to put it into words, but by the same token, the words often simply will not come if he doesn’t have a visual referent.

It was a confession of his to her, early on. She’d caught him the first time she arrived, wholly unexpectedly, at the loft. She’d stared, openly and eagerly, at the painfully early storyboard for the first Nikki Heat up on his office screen, and he’d confessed that he needed to walk through his characters' worlds. He needed to see everything around them—every obstacle and opportunity—before any given scene would fall into place.

That’s happening the wrong way around right now. That’s what this feels like. Multiple strands of words, long detached from images. A sudden onslaught of images he can’t affix to words, because he doesn’t know what he’s looking at, looking for, overlooking. He has the sudden, sinking feeling he’s been doing a lot of overlooking.

She is crouched by Sarah Vasquez’s body. There is a pale peach yoga mat rolled up on the sidewalk and he thinks of Roger and resistance bands. He thinks of sweat glistening on her skin and her breath coming in short, quick pants. _Yoga, Castle. I was doing yoga._

The tan leather of her gloves is stark against the white of her shirt as her fingers rise to her own chest in an unconscious gesture of terrible solidarity with their victim. He imagines it—he tries to imagine it—the scar she must have from a mercifully not-quite-identical wound.

He sees it, not long after—a terrible visual referent with the tendrils of blood washed away and the angry _Y-i_ ncision from Lanie’s autopsy. He sees its dimensions, its topography, and he’s all but overcome right there in the morgue. The sheer volume of words that well up in him almost take him down, and he’s all but useless with it.

He barely hears her words—her terrible question. _Did she feel it?_ It’s the tight, terrified expression on her face that arrests his attention. His mind ties it to that gesture, the distance traveled by her gloved fingers from her knee to the dead center of her chest. 

And then she is on the ground. It seems like that, though a night has passed with him furiously committing hideous words to paper, because he has an image now. He is caught up in the way Sarah Vasquez’s entry wound and yoga mat and her scar are bound inextricably together and she is _on the ground,_ driven there by nothing more than the chirp of a siren—a sound so familiar to them both that he has to rewind the sequence in his mind before he has any hope of understanding it.

He doesn’t understand it, though. He does not.

She flees the scene twice. He sees the slump of her shoulders, her unsteady gait, her back, receding, and he can’t believe it. He has no words for it.

He travels to the sniper’s hide with Esposito, because he doesn’t know what else to do. Esposito hands him the scope. People—humans—travel through his field of view. Crosshairs travel up one body, then another and he remembers the glint of sun off the sniper’s scope amid the field of white headstones. He pictures Sarah Vasquesz’s body in his sights, he pictures _Kate’s_ body in his sights.

It’s all happening out of order. It’s all happening at once. That’s what this feels like.

He has another memory—another flash of image from weeks ago. He is riding shotgun with Esposito. They are holding in an alley, waiting for the word from Beckett, from Ryan. Word comes. Esposito’s radio crackles and tumbles from the dash as he gives the car gas.

_My friends look around, I’m under the table._

It’s all out of order. Images and events and connections are all jumbled together. He doesn’t understand what she’s going through, what she needs. He doesn’t have the words for this.

It’s the second time she flees the scene. It’s happening again, or happening for the first time. It’s impossible. He’s watched her scream _Get her out of here_ in the presence of a sobbing victim, and it’s impossible.

He thinks of Jim Beckett on his doorstep. He remembers the steam curling up from the cup of coffee he’d offered the man. He remembers Montgomery giving him the gift of image—Kate in her uniform with a huge box on her lap. He thinks of the two men hanging their heads, swallowing pride, swallowing fear, and calling on him to help her.

But he is not the one who can help her now. He is without words of his own, images of his own, experiences of his own when it comes to scars.

So he swallows pride. He swallows fear. He asks for help.

_You’re the only one that has any idea as to what she’s going through.  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A rusty return and wish-washy yoga mat and scope. Hmmm.


	10. Once You Buy the Gimmick—Cuffed (4 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s particularly careful riding her bike home. She’s careful even before she swings her leg across the body to settle herself on the seat. She’s assiduous in situating and securing her helmet. She checks and double checks that everything’s in order before she eases away from the curb.

She’s particularly careful riding her bike home. She’s careful even before she swings her leg across the body to settle herself on the seat. She’s assiduous in situating and securing her helmet. She checks and double checks that everything’s in order before she eases away from the curb.

She’s cautious about traffic lights and scrupulous about signaling and checking her blind spots, and it’s not that she isn’t usually, it’s just that she’s …extra cautious, extra scrupulous. And she watches her speed, and okay, that’s a little _not usually._ She admits that to herself as she takes the last turn on to her block.

Her block.

That’s what really pulls her up short. The bike rumbles beneath her as she sits, staring up at her building—as she sits, with one foot still on the peg, the other planted on asphalt. She rode her bike _home._ Immediately home.

She writes it off to the tiger. She tells herself that one very-near-death experience was enough of an adrenaline pump for one evening. There’s no need to head somewhere on the desolate side to really let the bike open up, as she’d intended when she rode into the precinct this morning, She cuts the engine and heads for the front door.

The explanation springs a leak before she even gets there, though. She tugs her helmet off along the way, and the spill of her hair down her neck—the accompanying shiver—gives lie to it. The wind stirs, and she reaches to turn up her collar. She imagines the warmth of his hands is somehow still tucked beneath it, and she wants to race upstairs.

She wants to strip the coat off and press her face to it. She wants to tug the high neck of her sweater up and breath in what remains of his scent. She wants to fling herself on to the bed and let her mind race with thoughts of the boy she likes.

It’s the real secret to the care she’s taken tonight. It’s the root cause of the mirror checks and the careful turns. It’s the reason she came straight home—it’s him and the tiger combined.

She rides to quiet her mind, because the focus it takes to go fast and far over unknown terrain wears her out physically, mentally, emotionally. It’s a roaring, uncomplicated catharsis. At least she’s been telling herself that it’s uncomplicated.

But now she _has_ stripped her coat off. She has pressed her face into the collar for a long moment and slipped it on a hanger. She’s tugged the high neck of her sweater up and flung herself on to the bed. Her mind is racing with thoughts, and now she’s not so sure about the bike and dark roads on the desolate side. She’s not so sure it’s simple.

She’s been riding as often as she can since her doctor gave her the all clear. She’s been riding as far and fast and hard as possible, and truth be told, that started before the all clear. She didn’t do that tonight. She came straight home, and lying here, the pain digs in between her ribs like hot iron fingers, even from such a short, careful ride.

She tries to blame the tiger again. Her mind calls up stucco walls and chain-filled freezers. It presents as exhibits _A, B, C,_ and so on the hours she’s spent today performing death-defying feats of climbing and clinging and shoving and flopping, and some of that is surely it. Some of that is why her scars and her still-weak, still-mending body are screaming for mercy tonight. But those hot iron fingers tell a particular story about what she’s been up to.

She doesn’t have a death wish.

She closes her eyes and feels the room spin. She remembers the view from the top of the freezer tipped on its long end and the vertigo of the tiger leaping, of having nowhere to go. She remembers pressing closer to him anyway, holding his hand tighter, taking possession of more of his warmth, his scent—his scorching _nearness_ —and feeling exhilarated.

She doesn’t have a death wish.

That’s not what her all-hours rides have been about. But she hasn’t felt like this, either, in such a long time—skin prickling hot and cold, breath hard to come by in that heart-pounding, blood-singing way. She has not wanted to be alone with her tumultuous, racing thoughts in such a long time, and the tiger gets at least partial credit for that.

She doesn’t have a death wish, but there have been mornings when she’s stared at the ceiling for what feels like hours and wondered how in the hell she’s supposed to do this. There have been after-work sessions with Burke when the fifty minutes have expired and she’s wondered how to ask if he minds if she just lets her body sink into the leather of that oversized chair until she disappears. There have been days at a time when she’s been reckless on her bike, on the job, while crossing the street, because this is _hard._ Living is hard.

But the tiger has spoken, and she wants this. She presses her palms together and imagines the warmth of his skin working its way all through her. She curls on her side in the middle of the bed and gives the schoolgirl butterflies free rein. She inhabits that fierce, clarifying moment at what seemed like the end: _I’m so sorry. I’ve got nothing else. Kate—_

“No,” she says out loud. The warmth that pounds through her now is fury that’s all her own. It’s something reclaimed from those snarling jaws. _“No,”_ she says again. She practically shouts this time, and she knows, absolutely, what she means by it now.

She doesn’t have a death wish, and the next time he tells her that he loves her—the next time—it’ll be without the tiger. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This was going to be about the freezer. And then it wasn’t about the freezer. Hmmm.


	11. Gallant—Till Death Do Us Part (4 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kate Beckett is his plus-one. He is Kate Beckett’s plus-one. He and Kate Beckett are mutual plus-ones of one another, and if he doesn’t stop thinking about Kate Beckett and … mutual things … in such close proximity to one another, he’s going to be in real trouble.

Kate Beckett is his plus-one. He is Kate Beckett’s plus-one. He and Kate Beckett are mutual plus-ones of one another, and if he doesn’t stop thinking about Kate Beckett and … mutual things … in such close proximity to one another, he’s going to be in real trouble.

Just as the thought occurs to him, he takes a sharp elbow to the ribs that suggests he’s _already_ in real trouble, especially given the owner of said elbow, which he’d leave to the reader’s imagination, if there were a reader in this scenario. There’d better not be, because the text in question is his mind, and if anyone is reading that—if the owner of an elbow that is very sharp indeed is reading that—trouble isn’t the word for it.

He sneaks a peek out of the corner of his eye and meets a sidelong glare, the effect of which is somewhat diminished by shimmering tears that he was clearly not meant to see. He senses another shot to his ribs in his very near future and takes preemptive action. He lays a hand on the elbow that’s still linked through his. He draws a deep breath in and doesn’t fight the tears pricking the corners of his own eyes quite as hard as he has been. He meets that still-formidable glare with a bright-eyed, overflowing smile of his own, because Kevin and Jenny are lovely, and Kate is here with him and he is here with Kate.

The simplicity of the idea—the happiness it brings—quiets him. It keeps him out of trouble for most of the rest of the ceremony. There’s an elbow here and there, plus one actual pinch when he mouths _I, Gyrating Jenny, take you, Kinky Kevin_ during the vows, but it’s not as hard a pinch as it could be. They both know it’s the only thing standing between her and full-on tears, and in her way, she’s grateful. It’s a grateful pinch and that seems lovely to him, as well.

The reception is a different matter. They make their way into the hall together, but they can’t stay linked arm-in-arm forever. That seems stupid to him. It seems really _stupid,_ but Lanie catches her eye. She tips her head toward Esposito and lifts her eyebrows. Duty calls and Kate answers. She excuses herself with a soft Sorry and her hand resting over his this time, but it’s fine at first. He gets drawn into a toast at the bar with Esposito and a few of the folks from the precinct, and it’s fine until things kind of … ice over.

The metaphor occurs to him as he alternates staring through the cubes at the bottom of his own glass with scanning the room as one person after another greets her, pulls her this way and that to say hello to someone and then to someone else. It feels a lot like being at this wedding alone, and he hates that. He double extra hates that because she’s supposed to be his plus-one, and vice versa.

He wanders toward the long table with the tented place cards for lack of anything better to do. He scans up and down the rows for his name. He’s startled to come across Kate’s in the row of _B_ s, and immediately next to it, _Ms. Alexis Castle_ in the _C_ s. He stares at the two cards, side by side, and It stings a little bit. He comes over all mopey at the reminder that he’s not _really_ Kate’s plus one and she’s not _really_ his. And then then he feels a pang of guilt at his disloyalty to his daughter, and that’s just about enough of that.

He snaps himself out of his odd succession of moods, or tries to anyway. He pulls out his phone and crouches to take a picture of Alexis’s card, _in situ,_ from just the right angle so that her name is in focus and his, just behind, isn’t quite. He snaps one picture, then plucks the two little tents from the table, his and hers. He turns, then spins back and snaps up Kate’s, too, on a whim. He nests it together with his own and tucks the two of them into the inside pocket of his jacket.

With his daughter’s card still in hand, he finds nearby what he hopes will look like a lonely corner. He tries to compose a selfie with him staring forlornly at the card on his upturned palm. He’s still experimenting with how much pout is too much pout—if there even is such a thing when it comes to laying a guilt trip—when a hand appears from nowhere and plucks the card away.

“Can’t take you anywhere, Castle.” She lofts the card overhead for a moment. She smiles at him, and for one shining moment, it banishes all the ice in the universe. She turns the card over to read it and her face clouds a little. “Alexis,” she says, sounding uncertain. “She must be sorry to miss this.”

“Sorry might be a little strong,” he replies, a little too heartily.

“I thought—“ She looks up at him from beneath her lashes. There’s a question in her eyes he doesn’t quite understand. “I just figured she must have wanted to be …” She shakes her head, at him or herself, he’s not sure, but she finishes strong. She lifts her head and looks at him straight on. “… your date.”

“Not really,” he says slowly, carefully. He thinks he knows what she’s asking—what they’re talking about—but standing by the long table in a drafty hall, he feels far from the man who spent the ceremony’s long hour with her arm linked through his. “There was a fair amount of begging on my part. Not to mention bribery.”

“Bribery.”

She laughs. She taps the sleeve of his jacket with the stiff corner of the place card. It’s a tiny gesture, but one that feels intimate. One that makes him bold.

“Alexis,” he says, his voice low, “was my first and only choice.”

“Oh.” Her chin dips down and he sees color come into her cheeks and the corners of her mouth curve up. “Oh.”

“Did you—?” He can’t finish the question. He doesn’t have to.

“No,” she says, swiftly and forcefully. “I didn’t ask anyone.“ She chews her lip for a moment. “There wasn’t anyone I wanted to ask.”

“Oh,” he responds in kind, chin dipped down and color on his cheeks, a smile curving the corners of his mouth up until they’re grinning at each other unabashedly. “Until today, you mean.” He can’t resist the sly addition. He can’t resist producing their two place cards from the inside pocket of his jacket with a flourish. “Until you realized I was … available.”

He waggles his eyebrows. She rolls her eyes and snatches the cards from his hand. In the same motion, she slips her arm through his and delivers a sharp elbow to the ribs.

“Until your own kid stood you up, Castle.” She tugs him toward the tables. “There wasn’t anyone I wanted to ask until then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Place cards … so for chumps. Hmmm.


	12. Effacement—Dial M for Mayor (4 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Metaphors are his territory, not hers. That’s what she thinks when the slight weight of the eraser transfer’s from Gates’ hand to her own—that he should be here to raise an eyebrow, to comment on the act of expunging the story of Laura Cambridge’s murder in all its futility, all its brutality.

Metaphors are his territory, not hers. That’s what she thinks when the slight weight of the eraser transfer’s from Gates’ hand to her own—that he should be here to raise an eyebrow, to comment on the act of expunging the story of Laura Cambridge’s murder in all its futility, all its brutality.

But he’s not here, and she can’t really blame him. They’d parted as friends, as knocked about, raw-around-the-edges partners, but he’s not here, and with the twenty-four hour news cycle still spinning the scandal with Robert Weldon’s innocence as an afterthought, she can’t really blame him. She’ll just have to unpack her metaphors on her own.

A vicious energy propels her arm as she swipes at the board’s upper right side. _Mystery Man i_ n sarcastic quote marks. She expunges all that—so much nothingness—with a few strokes. She feels a perverse urge to find a picture of Jordan Norris to clip up there, if only for the satisfaction of filling out the too-empty _Suspect_ end of the board, if only to have someone guilty of something up there, however briefly.

The energy deserts her as the last of the mystery man–related ink disappears. She turns instinctively to the picture of Edgar Navarro next, then stops. It’s an early a mug shot—maybe his only mugshot—and she’s not even sure what he was in for. He looks simultaneously older and younger in it than he did with prison tats climbing his neck as he shifted nervously in his seat under the harsh interrogation lights.

Irony is his territory, too. The thought calls up a bitter chuckle as she swipes out the words _Of Interes_ t—she swipes out the connections between Edgar and Laura—and tugs the mugshot free of the board. She leans over to set it in the evidence box on top of Laura’s ID photo and it hits her—forcibly hits her—that the woman was a writer to her very core.

She looks from Laura’s slightly stilted government-issued-ID smile to Edgar’s shell-shocked face and knows, suddenly and completely, how it is that Laura would have learned that Edgar had done time, that he’d learned a trade and made good on the outside, that he was a walking story of redemption, and he could help.

She knows because she’s seen him put the pieces together in just that way a hundred times. She’s watched him find the story in every character they cross paths with on case after case.

She feels his absence sharply, then. More sharply. She sets the eraser down. She sets down Edgar Navarro’s mug shot and leans against the edge of her desk.

The piecemeal board feels more honest now. It has Weldon and Laura with the life choked out of her. It has scant evidence—Laura’s purse with its strange absences, a coat that has nothing to do with anything except the damage she can’t undo.

She thinks, with her head hanging and dry erase ink staining her fingertips, that she ought to be up there, too. She thinks maybe it’d be best if she retraced every letter down at the _Suspect_ end and tacked herself up there. She’s at least as much of a pawn as Jordan Norris. He’d just thought it was about the money, she’d just thought it was about the murder, and here they are—unwitting contributors to the very conspiracy Laura had died trying to avert.

She shakes herself out of the moment. She takes up the eraser again and rubs out the word _Victim_ with small, deliberate movements. She sets it aside, but only so she can pull down the other photos, Laura’s purse, her autopsy shots. The stock image of the cashmere coat tears a little when she yanks it free of its clip, and she smears everything she’d written about the fibers with a sloppy swipe.

Her hand falters over Weldon’s head shot, but down he comes. Down he goes, blank side up and into the box. She obliterates the word _Mayor_ —obliterates his name—as carefully as she’d erased the red-lettered Victim above Laura’s.

She’s left with very little. There’s Laura’s name and who she was in the last days, the last months of her life. She’s left with a woman who had immersed herself completely in work she believed deeply in. A woman who’d been compassionate and brave enough to surface in ways big and small when it was right and necessary—to not let her sister’s birthday pass without calling, to dismantle a plot against an innocent man, a _good_ man, if she could.

She’s left with a metaphor, with irony, with things that are very much his territory. But he’s not here. She can’t really blame him. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry, KB. You get the burden of my shitty day. Hmmm.


	13. Man's Best—An Embarrassment of Bitches (4 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Royal the dog absolutely lives up to the hype. 

Royal the dog absolutely lives up to the hype. 

He’s wanted a dog for literally as long as he can remember, but as a near-transient latchkey kid, as a suddenly wealthy playboy with a recently broken heart, as a not-quite-single father with a volatile ex, it was never in the cards. And he knows—in the grown-up part of his brain that he likes to keep shut up pretty tight, he _knows_ —that Royal is just a loaner. He _knows_ that joint custody with Beckett is just temporary, and still … everything about Royal the dog not only meets, but exceeds expectations. 

“You’re going to have such a good time at Beckett’s. She’s going to love you,” he tells him. The clock is ticking on, metaphorically, and he’s strangely nervous about the prospect of the impending handoff. “And you’ll have all your things. Mr Squeaky and everything.” _All his things_ now comprises the little Ryan had thought to grab from Francisco’s apartment plus an overflowing bag of obviously necessary supplies he himself had picked up on the way home. “So you don’t have to be sad or stressed out about spending the night there.”

Royal is sitting with his ears perked up, waiting for the next little bit of steak. He could not look less sad or stressed out if he were a one-dog jazz band, but his mother is out and Alexis has orchestrated yet another _Get Dad Ready for College Separation_ dry run, so it’s nice to have someone to talk to.

“She’s pretty great.” He finishes cutting the long, fatty strip of meat into minuscule pieces and moves them around the plate. Royal’s eyes follow with interest, but his poised _Sit_ never wavers. “Better than ever lately.” 

Without warning, he snatches a morsel of ribeye from the plate and tosses it in a high, lazy arc. 

“Air Royal!” he shouts, and the dog launches himself straight up. His jaws neatly snatch the treat at the peak of its ascent. He lands on four skidding paws and careens into Castle’s knees. “That’s good! You’re doing _so_ good with your new trick.” The dog leans heavily against him, clearly relishing the solid thumps to his flanks and the extra reassurance that he’s done well. “Just so you know, though, that might be a trick for here. You might want to lead with the _sit, stay, leave it_ at Beckett’s. You totally crush those.” 

Royal’s head tilts to the side in the classic dog interrogation pose. He caves immediately, of course, and wonders if she’d buy the argument that they definitely have to keep the dog, because he’d be an absolutely beast in the box. 

“Literally,” he says out loud as he administers a vigorous chin scratch. “You’d be a literal beast that even the most hardened criminals could not resist.” 

Royal rests a heavy snout against his thigh, happily enough, but there’s still a question in the liquid brown eyes. Or maybe he just needs it to be a question. Maybe he just needs someone to talk to about her. 

“It’s all about patience with Beckett,” he explains. “No sudden movements.” 

He combs the backs of his fingernails upward from the wet black nose to the broad expanse of fur between those liquid brown eyes. He laughs as they almost cross as he tries to follow the motion of his fingers. But then the golden lids flutter closed. Royal huffs out a moist, gratified breath. 

“I don’t know though.” His fingers move in circles now, hypnotic. 

There’s something about the warmth and absolute nearness of another creature—something about the presence of another being who is content to receive all the affection he’s eager to lavish—that’s put him in a yearning, contemplative mood,

“Maybe she—“ His hand stops, mid-circle. Royal’s eyes flick open in reproach. He mouths _sorry_ and resumes his duties. “She’s a lot better than she was. She smiles more, and she doesn’t look so tired all the time.” He risks a break in the _Royal’s New Favorite Pet_ action and lifts the dog’s chin. “She’s thinking about getting a dog! That’s pretty cool, right?” 

Royal’s tongue lolls. His paws do an eager dance in place, as though the swell of hope and affection and sheer _love_ in Castle’s own body is contagious. It is, he supposes. It’s part of the beauty of dogs. 

He snags another piece of meat from the plate that he’s nearly forgotten about. Royal has definitely not forgotten about it. A tiny whine escapes him and he looks immediately embarrassed. Castle fakes a few tosses straight overhead, then whips the morsels on a line drive across the room. Royal races after it, his feet scrabbling at the floor comically like Scooby Doo trying to get a running start. He hits the breakfast bar and comes galloping back, ready for more—ready for anything, and maybe that contagious thing works both ways. 

“Maybe she’s ready for a sudden move,” he says.”What do you think, boy?” 

Royal ducks into a playful bow with his wriggling butt high in the air. It’s a doggy _Yes_ if he ever saw one. It gives him courage. It buoys him up all the way from Soho to Tribeca. It makes him bold. He gushes about Royal, and he knows she likes it, even though she rolls her eyes. He knows she’s excited about having a dog—sharing custody—even if they both know he’s a loaner. 

She’s excited, and it’s contagious.

He makes a sudden move. He reaches for her hand and holds it fast. He traces hypnotic circles on her skin. He watches her intently— _intently_ —and she’s not quite ready for it. But she’s not _not_ ready, either. He feels her pulse pounding and the way her skin warms under his touch. He feels the swell of hope and affection in her, and now he knows. It’s about patience, yes, but not _just_ that.

That’s the beauty of dogs. 

_._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This was supposed to be about Mr. Squeaky telling no tails. But it ended up being about ribeye and hands and seizing the day and petting all the dogs. ALL THE DOGS. Hmmm


	14. Sole Survivor—The Blue Butterfly (4 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m thinking it must have been the Nazis,” he says once the elevator doors close and she’s trapped. “They messed with the Romany. Boom. There’s your curser right there.” 

“I’m thinking it must have been the Nazis,” he says once the elevator doors close and she’s trapped. “They messed with the Romany. Boom. There’s your curser right there.” 

“Curser?” She engages against her better judgment. “Is that a word?” 

“With an _o,_ with an _e_ , it’s a word.” He smiles smugly and rocks from heel to toe and back again. “But I suppose you don’t believe in the curse?” 

“I don’t believe in _any_ curses.” She studies the light gliding down, floor by floor, with exaggerated lack of interest. “Unless I’m the one making them happen.” 

The car dings open at the lobby. She casts a smug smile of her own over her shoulder as she heads out. He gives his tailbone an unconscious rub as he follows. 

“I know you don’t believe _in general_.” He gives her a long-suffering look. “But how could you not believe in this one?” 

“Gee, Castle, I don’t know.” She spins to face him, bumping open the glass door to the street with her backside in the same motion. “How could I not believe that someone would bother to curse a fake necklace?” 

“No one _knew_ it was fake.” He sails past her sidestepping to hold the door and usher her out with a flourish. “Every single person involved believed it was real and _acted_ on that.”

“That makes it a con, not a curse.” The night air is cold. She pulls her coat closer about her body and tips her face up to the bank of gunmetal clouds hanging low over the city. “Dempsey used it to play the big man—“ 

“And Priscilla Campbell died without it,” he finishes, then looks as if he wished he hadn’t. 

For all that he loves the bleak cityscapes and morally bankrupt characters of Phillip Marlowe’s world, such stark, violent end in the real world—for a flesh-and-blood woman whose greatest sin was attaching herself to a bad man to keep her head above water—weighs him down. It weighs her down too, but … less. Just from habit, just from self-preservation, it weighs her down less. 

She bumps him with her shoulder as they traverse the stretches of dark between indifferent pools of streetlight, trying to knock some of that weight loose. She tries to jostle him back into happier, juicier, curse-related thoughts, even though she doesn’t believe in curses.

“Sally and Lenny might’ve gotten away with it,” she says as though she’s dangling a carrot. “Lenny got greedy for it, though.” 

“Ooh, he _did_!” He turns a grateful look on her. “And stupid, too. If he’d just let Sally shoot them both first and _then_ grabbed the butterfly.” He stops himself short again. It’s a good story, and like all good stories, it’s rife with the kinds of things that are bound weigh on him. “I’m glad he was stupid,” he mumbles, hanging his head. 

“Me too,” she says quietly. 

It’s true, she supposes. It’s an odd thing to think, given those two bodies in the car—two young lives cut short by greed and betrayal and bitterness—but all the same, she’s glad it wasn’t Joe and Vera. She’s glad that Lenny was stupid. 

“Maybe that’s the _real_ curse,” she says. 

She’s more thinking out loud than anything, but his head swings toward her, and there’s a half grin on his face. 

“Stupidity?” He reaches for her elbow, drawing her closer to him to make room for a couple passing in the other direction. They nod and smile as New Yorkers only seem to do when he’s around. The two of them nod and smile back. “You might be on to something there. I mean Stan—“ 

“—quits a job as an account,” she jumps in without missing a beat. 

“Not a very _good_ accountant, I’m thinking,” he interjects. 

“Because he finds _one_ coin and thinks he’s going to be a treasure hunter.” She nods him toward the short block she’d managed to find a space on. “Yeah, I’m thinking stupidity is the real curse here.” 

“Except there’s no curse,” he says as he stops by the passenger door, waiting for her to pop the locks. 

“No curse?” She regards him across the car roof, pale with the layer of frost that’s formed in the hour or so they’ve been off hearing about Vera and Joe’s unlikely happily ever after. “What?” 

“I’ve thought it through, and I can say with one-hundred percent certainty that the blue butterfly was not cursed.” 

He throws open his door with a dramatic gesture and slides into the seat. She follows suit, with considerably less drama and considerably more irritation.

“No curse.” She chews her lip and drums her fingers on the steering wheel. “Okay, Castle. Spill.” 

“There is one person in this whole saga who lives.” He half turns in his seat to face her. “One person motivated by pure greed and unalloyed lust for the kind of fame that only such a storied artifact could bring. One person—”

“Clyde Belasco.” She smiles and shakes her head. “Clyde Belasco lives.” 

“Exactly!” He holds up a triumphant finger. “That guy? Any curse worth its salt would take that guy _out_.” 

“First thing.” She laughs up at the car roof. Her breath forms instant clouds on the driver’s side window, on the windshield. She switches on the ignition and cranks the heat. “Absolutely first thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A pretty feeble effort, but it’s late, and I have gotten so, so, sooo behind I will never not be behind again. Hmmm.


	15. Disarming—Pandora (4 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He wonders if he should offer to buy her a new gun. Or … what? Offer to fill out the paperwork to requisition a new gun? He probably can’t, willy nilly, just buy an NYPD Detective a new gun, but that would be kind of cool if he could. He’d buy guns for the boys, too—something bespoke to fit each of their personalities. Beckett’s would be sleeker than her Glock, which is frankly kind of boxy and nondescript, though that’s not why wonders if he should offer to buy—or requisition, as appropriate to a sworn officer—a new one for her. 

He wonders if he should offer to buy her a new gun. Or … what? Offer to fill out the paperwork to requisition a new gun? He probably can’t, willy nilly, just buy an NYPD Detective a new gun, but that would be kind of cool if he could. He’d buy guns for the boys, too—something bespoke to fit each of their personalities. Beckett’s would be sleeker than her Glock, which is frankly kind of boxy and nondescript, though that’s not why wonders if he should offer to buy—or requisition, as appropriate to a sworn officer—a new one for her. 

The first reason he’s wondering is that he has a bag over his head. He’s wending his way from New Jersey to somewhere in the back seat of a—speaking of boxy and nondescript—government-issue sedan of some kind, and the chances of him getting car sick and barfing into said head bag are greatly diminished if he keeps his mind occupied with burning questions such as how quickly and in how many different ways would she kill him if he got her one of those pearl-handled, Barbara-Stanwyck-at-Peak-Noir-Hotness Derringers that are just the right amount smaller than a clutch purse. 

The second reason his thoughts have wandered in the direction of firearms, despite the fact that the last day or so makes him a top target-practice candidate for her, is that she has just been deprived of her gun for the second time _today._ There’s a whole lot of _not good_ that goes along with that. 

There’s the adjacent unpleasantness, for one thing: Head bagged and hands zip-tied, stuffed in a trunk, and now a second round of head bagging. That’s way too much down time to think about the humiliation of weapon deprivation, and the fact that Jones at least spared the delicate flesh of their wrists a little mercy this time around is probably not the silver lining it might otherwise be. It no doubt reminds her of what’s not _in_ her conveniently free hands, namely her boxy, nondescript, Not-Nearly-Sexy-Enough-for-Someone-Who-Surpasses-Barbara-Stanwyck-at-Peak-Noir-Hotness Glock. 

There’s also the fact that he’s kind of responsible for both gun-loss incidents. His once-and-future bagged head is still spinning at how quickly Jones—presumably Jones?—managed to silence, restrain, and bag him back at Tracy McGrath’s house. 

He’s still hearing the damned click of the good agent’s safety in the instant after the alarmed and deeply confused sound of his name coming out of her mouth as she regarded him in all his Insta-Captive: Just Add Water! glory. He can only imagine the fury on her face as she handed it over that first time, but courtesy of all that head bagging and trunk stuffing, he’s had plenty of time to imagine it. 

He goes back and forth on his culpability for _Disarming Beckett 2: Electric Boogaloo._ He thinks it’s his fault because they were kind of bickering right before Gage materialized behind them and then used his ninja-like reflexes to swipe the gun right out of her hand. But then he thinks it’s _her_ fault, because there should have been nothing to bicker about. 

They should have definitely waited for backup before opening the doomsday briefcase. That’s not just common sense, it’s straight out of the Little Miss Protocol Handbook, and anyway, Gage’s reflexes aren’t ninja-like at all. They’re _Navy Seal_ –like, and she got that memo, same as him, but then he’s back to thinking it’s his fault, because the bickering, the pointlessly challenging a Navy Seal thing, is pretty much about Sophia. 

In the depths of his stupid black head bag, he allows himself a Cheshire Cat grin. She has something to prove because of Sophia. She’s _jealous_ of Sophia, and that makes his stomach flutter in a way that has almost nothing to do with head bags, New Jersey, and boxy, nondescript sedans. She’s jealous, and not just of the CIA’s underground lair. In fact, he’d go so far as to say that what has the good detective off her game is not lair-related at all. It’s _him_ related, and well, there he is swinging back toward feeling guilty for both losses of her gun. 

Even if she gets it back this time, it’s bound to be tainted for her. If he can’t replace it, maybe he can get it … karmically decontaminated or something. He knows a guy and a gal and another guy so he can probably cover his bases with any number of supernatural beings. 

He’s come down on the side of exorcism—of at least _offering_ exorcism as a possibility—when the car stops. She’s hopping mad when the head bag comes off. Her jaw works so vigorously that he fears for her molars, and he’s gratified to see that the unflappable Jones is more than a little flapped by her fury. 

But her elevator fury is nothing—it is absolutely _nothing_ —to the rage rolling of her when Sophia strides in holding out that boxy, nondescript Glock like she’s handing out favors at the world’s most violent bridal shower, and—oh. He’s going to have to replace that for her. He’s going to have to drop this one in the fires of Mount Doom and replace it.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: What can I say? My song this week could not have adverbs or adjectives. And Beckett is soooo jealous and soooo multiply mad about the gun. Hmmm. 


	16. Ipseity—Linchpin (4 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She leaves him with Sophie Turner’s body, his friend and muse and sometime lover. She leaves him with the body of the woman had just betrayed him, had just come seconds from killing him. She leaves him with it, because she has no choice. 

She leaves him with Sophie Turner’s body, his friend and muse and sometime lover. She leaves him with the body of the woman had just betrayed him, had just come seconds from killing him. She leaves him with it, because she has no choice. 

He’s himself when she sees him again. When the world is safe and the body is gone and they are blessedly above ground to stay, he is, as ever, himself. He’s a little quiet, maybe, in the immediate aftermath, at least, and even when they’re back at the precinct. He’s a little turned inward, and she knows him better than Danberg does—she might know him better than anyone does—so she sees the hesitation when he asks about his father. She sees that it costs him, less to ask than it would _not_ to ask, but it does cost him. 

He is resilient, though. He is at home in the early morning light that’s reached the work room windows, even when he asks the question again—asks her this time if she thinks that Sophia, in spite of everything, might have, in the end, given him a key to such a big part of his life. 

She’d like to tell him maybe. She’d like to say she’s sorry for leaving him alone with all of that racing through his head—alone with the body—but she doesn’t think it's the knots that Sophie tied her in that makes her believe that the woman would have head faked him in the last moment of his life for the sheer pleasure of doing it. So she tells him the truth, the gentlest version of it that she can, and he is, as ever, himself. 

He shoots her a grin that makes him look every inch the little boy and asks if she thinks they saved the world. She says she’ll settle for having saved a little girl, and he shoots her a smile more radiant as if to say he likes her answer better. 

She bumps him with her shoulder. He shoves his hands in his pants pockets and blushes a little and it’s all ok. Whatever’s passed between them over the last couple of days—whatever she’s done or failed to do that would be unthinkable under any other sun—they seem to have moved beyond it all. 

It worries her, a little. It’s a relief that he is the most difficult man in the world and the easiest to be with, but she’s grown suspicious of that very thing lately. She’s come to wonder if the things he seems to let go so easily really cost him, deep down, and she’s come to question absolutely everything about her own emotional intelligence, such as it is. And wherever they are now, wherever they might be if she can ever truly heal from the injury of her mom’s murder, she worries that she’s … imposing on his resilience. She might know him better than anyone, and she _worries._

She’s on the verge of saying something—asking if he’s okay or blurting out what would no doubt be an awkward apology for leaving him in the awful glare of that strange white room with Sophia Turner’s body—but he gets there first. 

“I closed her eyes,” he says, loudly enough that the woman passing them by on the street in front of the precinct looks around as if he might be talking to her. 

“Sophia’s,” she says. It’s a dumb thing to say. It’s not as though he’s got a backlog of women hanging around who need their eyes closed, but she’s startled. 

She doesn’t know how they’re on the street already. She doesn’t remember the elevator ride down or the lobby. She doesn’t remember if he held the door for her or if they had already nodded their goodnights and turned to go their separate ways. 

“I probably shouldn’t—” His breath hitches. She can sense him reaching for a joke, trying to cut the tension for her sake, or maybe for his own, but he doesn’t have it in him. “Shouldn’t have touched the body,” he finishes, his voice low. 

“Royce’s were open a little.” The words come out in a jerky, disjointed string. It’s painful. It’s _so_ painful to remember the filthy streetlight slanting down to glint off his staring, blown-out pupils. “I wish I had.” She shakes her head, wondering at the way the macabre subject loosens something inside her. “I wish I had done that for him.” 

“I don’t know why I wanted to.” His tone is laced with anger. His fingers clench in fists at his sides. “She was going to kill us both.” He lets out a bitter snort. His head tips back.”For starters,” he tells the sky, loudly enough again that they’re drawing stares from up and down the block. “She was a freaking … aspiring mass murderer!” 

She doesn’t say anything at first. She braces, because this is who he is, too. He is not pure resilience and equanimity. He is the most difficult man in the world and difficult to be with sometimes. And she wants to know him, so she waits him out for a beat, for two, for three. When it seems he’s yelled himself out—when it seems like the right time—she speaks softly. 

“It’s not about who she was. It’s about who _you_ are.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oops. Bodies again. But at least you didn’t have to live through my murder song—grisly without adjectives or adverbs. Hmmm. 


	17. Mani in Fede—Once Upon a Crime (4 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has the most amazing hands. He feels his got-it-bad levels spiking off the charts every time the thought occurs to him—and at this point it’s occurring with alarming frequency—but it’s true. She does. And for the record, he has been of the opinion that she has amazing hands since before he had it bad. Well. Since before it had it this bad, anyway. 

She has the most amazing hands. He feels his _got-it-bad_ levels spiking off the charts every time the thought occurs to him—and at this point it’s occurring with alarming frequency—but it’s true. She does. And for the record, he has been of the opinion that she has amazing hands since _before_ he had it bad. Well. Since before it had it _this_ bad, anyway. 

They are strong hands. He and his ear and his nose and his wrists and so on got to experience that up close and personal from early on. But even when she was not bringing that strength to bear on on various probably-not-supposed-to-be-erotic parts of his body it had caught his attention in the easy grip on her weapon in the field and on the firing range, in the surety of her grip on the wheel of her unmarked as she’d brute forced her way through Manhattan traffic at all hours. 

And for all their strength—for all their no-nonsense functionality—they are elegant, too. They are cared for. She doesn’t go in for manicures, in general, but her nails are neat and uniform, and occasionally covered with a coat or two of clear polish. Even in the dead of winter, her skin is soft and untouched even the most brutal cold, and she has a collection of gloves to rival his mother’s—to rival her own collection of coats and high-heeled everything. He thinks she might be a little vain about her hands, and he doesn’t blame her. They’re amazing. 

They know to hold the stem of a champagne flute so as not to warm the wine with body heat, and they are fastidious as they pluck candy after candy from the dish on her desk. They are precise and fastidious as they snatch—right out of the greasy paper bag—whatever it is she makes him buy her after they leave Lanie to deal with Red Riding Hood in the park. And damned if they don’t still look elegant as she licks each finger clean in turn like a wicked little kid.

They drag an absolutely straight timeline across the bottom of the murder board, case after case, and they are deft and sure in carrying four coffee mugs at a time when they two of them have to huddle up with the boys. They’re even adorable in how clumsy they are every time she foolishly tries to make her own espresso or—heaven forfend—latte. 

They’re as quick and strong in play as they are in what she probably thinks of as disciplinary violence and he thinks of as utterly random assaults. They’re decisive in chess and inscrutable in cards, and she’s been picking his pocket with some regularity ever since Zalman Drake. She’s been _un_ picking with some regularity, for that matter. 

She imperiously makes him buy this, that, and the other thing from whatever street vendor catches her fancy on a given day, and later his jacket pockets fill up with random bills now and then. When she really wants to annoy him, she makes things disappear—most recently the mystery note that Velasquez hands her—even though he’s watching those damnable, amazing hands the whole while. 

Her hands hide smiles more and more these days, and they reveal them. She’ll let one build behind a curled fist, then unfurl her fingers and it’s radiant. He’s noticed sometimes that her hands rake through her hair as though she’s expecting it to be shorter—as if she herself is surprised to find that over the years the rest of her look has caught up with the care and attention she’s always given to her hands, even back in her performatively austere days. 

And lately— _lately_ —he’s learned how delicate her hands are for all that skill and strength. He’s stared in disbelief to find that they absolutely disappear in the confines of his own. He’s traced the arch of her wrist and felt the sweep of her lifeline beneath his fingertips. He knows precisely where to find the pulse near the base of her thumb and how to make it pound. With and without the tiger, with and without Royal the dog to chaperone, he knows how quickly her skin warms to his touch. 

He knows she like to wrap her fingers around his, or let her own disappear in the comparatively vast expanse of his palm. He knows she’s not big on fingers interlaced, and he knows it’s ridiculous. He’s a a grown man and she’s a grown woman, and right now—at this very moment—he knows the simple _got-it-bad_ joy of holding her hand and it’s wonderful. 

He has always thought she has the most amazing hands. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is nonsensical. But my babes were HOLDING HANDS. Hmmm.


	18. Lifeline—A Dance With Death (4 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Grocery stores are weird. She’s managed to forget this in the years she’s sustained herself, in large part, on vending machine food, take out, and various dead of night grab-ables from the bodega. But she’s trying—as part of Operation Be More—to be kinder to herself physically as well as mentally. Hence an actual grocery store in which a hundred varieties of chips are less front and center, which is weird. 

Grocery stores are weird. She’s managed to forget this in the years she’s sustained herself, in large part, on vending machine food, take out, and various dead of night grab-ables from the bodega. But she’s trying—as part of Operation Be More—to be kinder to herself physically as well as mentally. Hence an actual grocery store in which a hundred varieties of chips are less front and center, which is weird. 

She pushes her cart—a full-sized cart, not an ancient, cracked plastic basket slung over one arm—up one aisle and down the next, and she’s almost overwhelmed by the variety. She has a handful of panic items that she’s thrown into the cart so that she doesn’t contribute to the general weirdness of place, but no two things that go together, no two things that would form the basis of a meal or—and here’s a concept—several meals that she might eat in her home over a period of days. 

She liked to cook, once upon a time. Loved to, actually, because it was something she did both _with_ her mom and _for_ her sometimes when she was lost in a case or in writing policy briefs and so on for her organization. She’s confessed to Burke—confessed in the pages of the journal she’s been trying to keep in her stilted, piecemeal way—that she’s closed the door on any number of things that she associates with her mom. 

So this trip out of her comfort zone is about reclamation. It’s about planning and executing and _enjoying_ a thing she was once good at. It’s supposed to be, but currently in her basket are are paper towels, a sugary kids’ cereal she will never eat, tahini, a can of black olives and a cheap, plastic ladle, because she didn’t make a list. She didn’t _plan,_ so there’s nothing to execute. It’s ridiculous. She turns a corner and makes another hard right down an aisle she’s sure she’s traversed at least twice. 

It turns out she hasn’t, though. It’s the cookie aisle, and at this point, there’s a definite danger that she’ll simply run the length of it with her arm outstretched, sweeping every last sleeve, bag, packet, and box into the cart. She starts a three-point turn to extract herself from danger, but something across the aisle catches her eye. 

This side is all things on yellow styrofoam trays with plastic wrapped over the top. Orange starburst stickers proclaiming the items to be _“Fresh Baked!!”_ pepper the packages up and down the aisle. She has her doubts, but some enticing smells waft their way toward her, and her stomach growls. She’s not even sure how long she’s been here, and _now_ she’s very much on the verge of abandoning her eclectic cart, mid-aisle, grabbing whatever smells best and trusting that the last dill pickle spear she has in her fridge will be sufficient to take the edge off her hunger later tonight. 

There’s yellow styrofoam in her hands. She’s pushed the cart away from her with no-nonsense force. She’s pivoting in place, tying to orient herself, because at this point she has no idea where the exit even is. She is aborting the mission when another orange starburst sticker catches her eye. _“GOOEY CENTER!!!!”_ it declares. The bold caps and excess of exclamation marks have a schlocky horror movie quality to them, but it makes her laugh. She takes it as a sign, one that’s offering up the most obvious course of action. 

She pushes … whatever this is beneath the plastic wrap back on to the shelf and forces herself to reset. She jogs after the still-rolling cart and manages to catch up before it becomes a complete runaway. She stops and reviews the map of the weird, stupid store that her mind has been making, even as she’s wandered, aimless and overwhelmed. 

She holds on to the paper towels and the olives. She puts the cereal with its disturbing animal mascot back among the other too-bright boxes. She ends up hanging the ladle on a random end cap, because where cheap ladles even come from in a store like this? She wheels her cart to the quietest corner she can find, against the back wall of the place, half hidden by the hot bar. 

She steels herself. She takes a deep breath that she finds she doesn’t need. Her thumbs navigate speed dialing his number without hesitation. The sound of her name down the line is a relief, and she’s practically talking right over him.

“What should I make?” she demands. “I’m at the store.” 

_“The store?”_ He’s confused for half a second, then his voice turns eager. _“Oooh, will you get me some cajun dill gator-tators if they have them? I ask and ask at mine, but they won’t order them in.”_

 _“_ Not the bodega.” She looks around, still not quite believing it, though she’s been here for who knows how long. “A real grocery store. To buy stuff.” 

_“Stuff … to cook?”_

It’s not fair, but she’s a bit short with him. She’s hungry and wishes he’d catch up. “I _cook_ , Castle!”

 _“I don’t doubt that,”_ he says, sounding exactly as though he doubts that very much. _“Are you looking for something quick, or more substantial?”_

“Something to _eat,”_ she tells him pointedly. “Something that’s not … in a foil bag and doesn’t have a hippo in Hammer pants on the box. And _no_ orange stickers.” 

_“Right_ ,” he says, quietly at first, then more firmly as he dives right in to the out-of-the-blue request. _“Right._ _Let’s start with produce. That’s fruits and vegetables. Do you remember what those look like?”_

“I eat—” she begins, but he heads her off at the pass.

_“Ancient dill pickles don’t count, Beckett.”_

“They do so,” she insists. She sounds sullen, but she’s grinning all the while as she strikes out for the produce section. “Pickles totally count.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A gooey center is definitely an object. In case you were curious. (Another one that bent a completely different way from what I as thinking about.) Hmmm. 


	19. Omega—47 Seconds (4 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He goes back to the beginning for her coffee, back to the truck where he overheard her order for the first time. Overheard. He hears her voice in his head—a laugh and audible sarcastic quote marks around the word. He hears their future, the two of them trading parts of their story back and forth. He feels her shoulders beneath his arm, and let’s face it, at least a couple of elbow shots to his ribs, but he pictures the scene, clear as day. 

He goes back to the beginning for her coffee, back to the truck where he overheard her order for the first time. _Overheard_. He hears her voice in his head—a laugh and audible sarcastic quote marks around the word. He hears their future, the two of them trading parts of their story back and forth. He feels her shoulders beneath his arm, and let’s face it, at least a couple of elbow shots to his ribs, but he pictures the scene, clear as day. 

This is the right place. She likes the vanilla from another place better, and he thought about that. And then there’s the place that’s a little farther away, but they’ll do a little pair of handcuffs in the foam if it’s not too busy and he begs. He thought about that, too. There are places where she swears the espresso has a little more get up and go, and others where she likes the mellow-ness of the beans they roast in house. He thought about all of them while he was working his nerve up, but this is the right place to get the most momentous cup of coffee he’s brought her, to date. 

“Large cappuccino for my friend the stranger, and a large skinny latte, two pumps sugar-free vanilla.” Marian is pushing one cup toward him across the stainless steel ledge as soon as his turn at the front of the line comes up. The guy still waiting on his order looks incredulous, because he doesn’t understand that waiting is the penalty for being a blowhard who yells into his cell phone, rather than actually being ready with his order. Marian pays him no mind at all. She waits with her grease pencil poised over the second cup. ”For Nikki?”

“For Kate,” he says. His voice breaks a little. He sounds like a boy who just hit puberty hard, which is appropriate, all things considered. “Today’s a Kate day.” 

  
He stuffs an extra-large tip into the jar and brushes by the blowhard, who is _still_ yelling into his phone, but now also throwing his arms up as though the world owes him some explanation beyond the obvious for why he still doesn’t have his coffee. 

He double times it to the precinct so the latte will be the perfect temperature when he sets it in front of her. His heart feels like it’s galloping figure-eights in his chest as he rides the elevator up, and he wonders for a sacrilegious instant if he should have gotten a decaf for himself.

He feels light headed for a second when he hands the coffee to her and she smiles. She’ll know after this cup of coffee. She’ll _know,_ and now he has sweaty palms to go with his pubescent voice. He sits, though. He installs himself in his chair, and he’s resolved. He begins. He makes a start, and he sees a stillness settle over her. He has her absolutely undivided attention and he hears their future again. 

_Right in the middle of the_ precinct _._ That’s her, as though she’s scandalized. _You have to admit that even the precinct was an upgrade from the first time._ That’s him, waggling his eyebrows as though that’s a salacious part, even as he grabs her hand under the table and squeezes, because it’s still terrifying how close they came to never having this life. 

In the here and now he hears himself say, _And I don’t want that to happen_. He sees her breath catch—he sees her lean forward almost imperceptibly—and he knows that she doesn’t want it to happen either. But Ryan—Kevin Impediment Ryan, of the New York City Ryans—feels differently, and he wants to _weep_ for that cup of coffee. She meets his eyes and he’s not sure she _isn’t_ weeping for that coffee, on the inside at least. 

But there is the job. There is always the job, and the next cup he brings her will just have to be the most momentous one to date. 

The cup she pours herself when she’s in with Haynes intervenes. He’s offended by it. He finds it _offensive_ , because it’s from an hours-old pot, because she has to pour it herself, into a paper cup for God’s sake. Because she’s alone in the room with the man they are all but sure murdered five people, and he is not coping at all well with the fact that he’s not in there with her. He’s not coping at all well with the way Haynes keeps slithering deeper into her personal space and every last iota of that anxiety gets projected on to that damned, offensive cup of coffee. 

His courage—his sense of urgency—is renewed by a conversation over emergency cheering-up pancakes. Yesterday’s most-momentous cup of coffee, he tells himself, was just a dry run. Today is the day. He makes his way to Marian again and takes it as a good omen that there’s no blowhard today. He says it’s a Kate day again. He almost confides that he thinks they’ll all be Kate days from here on out, but he can’t hear a future in which Kate does not kill him for telling Marian first. 

He hurries toward the precinct. The walk sign blazes the second he hits the intersection. The elevator dings open for him before he even has to do any awkward fumbling of the cups to press the button. He smiles at the good omens, faltering only when he spies her empty desk. 

The news from Esposito that they very well might have their man is more or less the only thing in the world that could pry his attention from the need to hand her the _real_ most momentous coffee to date. He watches her in the box. She’s at the top of her game, and it feels right that the moment should come—that their future should start— _after_ this. 

It feels right until the world flies apart. 

Until that moment, the metaphor of a gut punch has always felt a bit hackneyed to him. But his breath leaves him. His ears ring and he all but doubles over. He races from he observation room. He pounds down the stairs, awash in humiliation, awash in misery. 

He’s blocks away before he remembers. He’s an immeasurable distance away, and the future is silent. 

But the picture of it fills up his mind’s eye—the white cup with _Kate_ in grease pencil on the side. 

The last coffee he will ever bring her. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Coffee always feels like a cheat. Hmmm.


	20. Spectral—The Limey (4 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There should be more triumph in this. The night had so nearly been a bust. The case had so nearly stalled out entirely, and then she had lifted the card case with finesse born of desperation, and the way that has been barred should be open to them any second. She should be lit up with the ferocious thrill of the chase, but instead there’s something … All About Eve–era Bette Davis about her reflection in the locker room mirror as she eases the drop earrings from her lobes and reaches for the pins in her hair, one-by-one. 

There should be more triumph in this. The night had so nearly been a bust. The case had so nearly stalled out entirely, and then she had lifted the card case with finesse born of desperation, and the way that has been barred should be open to them any second. She should be lit up with the ferocious thrill of the chase, but instead there’s something … _All About Eve_ –era Bette Davis about her reflection in the locker room mirror as she eases the drop earrings from her lobes and reaches for the pins in her hair, one-by-one. 

She’s gotten the dress off, with difficulty. She’s gotten herself out of all the necessary gear that goes underneath. It’s left her sore and more exhausted than is reasonable. She wasn’t careful enough dabbing away the foundation she’d had lay on thick to cover the scar between her breasts. 

Some of it has rubbed off on the inside of the tank top that sits closest to her skin now. It’s a stupid thing, but it makes her sad, even though the mark doesn’t show once she pulls her t-shirt and boxy blazer on over it. It makes her feel out of herself, and even the familiar ritual gestures that go along with strapping her dad’s watch back on to her wrist can’t seem to set her to rights.

The whole affair makes her weary, struggling to keep the dress clipped to the hanger as she wrestles it into a garment bag that’s really too small. Stowing her shoes and everything, trying to remember what she did with the little velvet pouch the earrings go in, it all makes her weary.

The memory of another dress weighs on her. Another two dresses. It feels like a million years ago that she squirmed and sniped and held her breath as Lanie laced her into the red satin vision he’d sent because he’d known she was bluffing when she said black tie wasn’t a problem. It feels, paradoxically, like _two_ million years since he’d relieved her of a garment bag and she’d taken his arm and they’d shared delightfully catty post mortems of their aborted dates over real food, surrounded by actual people. 

She manhandles _this_ garment bag into her locker. There’s barely enough room and she has to double the bottom over on itself to deal with the length. It’s a mess she’ll have to deal with some other time. 

She trails back to the sink—to the mirror—but there’s nothing more to do. Her make-up’s too heavy for her work clothes, but the alternative is scrubbing down to the skin and starting over, and she doesn’t have the energy. She doesn’t at all, so she schools her face in the mirror. She practices looking like herself—looking pleased at the victory she’s snatched from the jaws of defeat. 

She lands on something close, and it’ll have to do. She glances at her watch and realizes that she’s been longer about this than she should have been. So she rolls her shoulders back. She reminds herself how it is that she walks, what her stride feels like when she has something on a person of interest. 

She makes her way into the bullpen. It’s not deserted—of course it’s not—but the sights and sounds feel far away from her. They feel too loud and too close, yet too … impenetrable at the same time. Every movement is _hard,_ as though the stupid struggle to get out of the dress—to arrive back in herself—has taken the very last of what she has to give to the world tonight. 

She needs to find Esposito to confirm Wyndham’s print. She needs to get Gates to pull the man himself out of his tinkling, empty party. She needs to do a dozen things at once—immediately—but she finds herself looking for the back-up murder board. 

She drifts past the real thing, moving with difficulty through the world she doesn’t feel a part of right now. She sees that it’s been rolled back to its usual, out of the way spot. She approaches slowly, at an oblique angle, but even from here, she can see that someone has wiped it clean of the diagram for his elaborate scheme. _He_ has wiped it absolutely clean. 

She has no way of knowing, yet she’s absolutely certain it’s true. She draws close enough to place her hand on the board’s glossy surface. Her nose stings with the sharp scent of the cleaning solution he must have used to eradicate the ink so completely. 

She reaches up to switch on the work lamp clamped to the top. Her eyes sweep over the board, top to bottom, side to side. The wide pool of light catches something in the metal tray, half hidden by the eraser—three somethings. She picks them up, one after the other, and tilts them on the surface of her palm until they’re clear of the shadows. 

It’s the magnets he had made, God knows when. There’s Ryan looking befuddled and caught off guard. There’s Esposito looking ready to murder someone. And there he is, and there she isn’t.

She has no part in the scheme—none at all. 

She sets the magnets back in the metal tray, one after the other, and feels the leaden impulse to cry like a child. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Exceptionally bad timing for these episodes to come up. Oh, well. Those magnets are ridiculous. Hmmm. 


	21. Shards—Headhunters (4 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He has to force down the ice cream he shares with Alexis. It’s a sign in a sea of signs that all is not right with his world.

He has to force down the ice cream he shares with Alexis. It’s a sign in a sea of signs that all is not right with his world.

He builds their sundaes high and wide, of course. He breaks out the special glasses and spoons, because they are not just contemplating tough decisions—they are not just thinking about injury and recovery—they are celebrating, and it's a celebration that’s overdue. 

Because he’s been intercepting her mail for weeks, and that’s almost certainly more about protecting himself than it is about protecting her. 

Because he was hungover when he should have been celebrating with her.

Because he’s a mess. 

Whipped cream and hot fudge can’t hide that fact. Not even sprinkles and a cherry on top can really hide it, but his daughter is blissfully, mercifully too preoccupied with her triumphs—with the sobering choice she has to make—to notice that he has to employ some of the dinner-table trickery he’d used back when she was supposed to eat her vegetables and he was definitely not going to eat his. 

He’d like to attribute the sudden, unsettling connection between ice cream and Brussels sprouts to the fact that he Is the walking wounded right now, and that’s part of it, certainly. Working backward, he’s experiencing continuous, rolling waves of nausea from Slaughter’s literal gut punch. And thanks to his own stupidity in the days before that, he thinks he might be hungover until Alexis graduates from college. 

On top of the nausea, he’s comprehensively bruised and battered. His hand throbs so incessantly from punching Slaughter that—at least according to his drunken phone searches—he’s been looking into the possibility of a home X-Ray machine so he can count the hairline fractures and maybe name them. 

His nose aches where Shay’s exceptionally thick head bashed into it, and he really hopes that the leg sweep he did to take the goon down—and avoid sudden death by barstool—at least looked cool, because he’s pretty sure he left a part of his spine that seems pretty crucial on that bar room floor. He has microscopic glass shards in his fingers and the meat of his palm from the beer bottle that took Shay down for good. They unpredictably shriek like miserable, subcutaneous fire ants when the world drags against them the wrong way, and that pretty much feels like a metaphor for his existence right now. 

He’s forcing down ice cream and only half listening to his daughter, because he’s too preoccupied with taking inventory of his injuries and idiocies. The things he can point to aren’t the half of it. The things he can ice and prod and go after with tweezers really just are not even close to the half of it. 

He rubs his chest absently and feels the phantom width of the seatbelt catching him as Slaughter slammed on the brakes, then accelerated, over and over again, cranking the wheel hard all the while. There’s no bruise he can see, but his hand goes instinctively to the center of his chest every time his mind cues up the brutal _thunk_ of Gilberto Mendoza’s unsecured body jarring the very frame of the car as it slammed from one end of the trunk to the other. 

He runs hot and cold and panicked when he thinks of the boy’s face as he came reeling out of the trunk into daylight—eighteen and not headed to college. Eighteen and his feet held to the fire over a brother even younger than him. Eighteen and Slaughter hadn’t talked to the Feds, to the DA, to anyone, about not sending him back out on to the street to be cut down by Valés. 

Gilberto Mendoza is more than half the reason that he’s sneaking every other spoon into the quarter mug of coffee he’d poured himself after he’d set their sundaes out with a flourish on their fanciest placemats. Gilberto Mendoza and the idiotically dangerous situation he’d gotten Ryan and Esposito into. Gilberto Mendoza and Beckett’s job. 

Gilberto Mendoza and Beckett. They are far more than half the reason for everything. 

“Dad!” The sharp note in his daughter’s voice cuts through his miserable reverie. She plants her own spoon like a flag in the ice cream she’s nearly done with already and pries his out of his hand “Enough. If you don’t want it, don’t eat it!” 

“Don’t want it?” he says lamely. “Why would I not—” 

Her hand shoots out and snatches the mug that’s now filled with a vile mess of cold coffee and offloaded ice cream. She tips it accusingly toward him as though she might well dump it in his lap. 

“Dad.” She sets the mug down on the counter. “What is going on with you? I’m worried.” 

“You don’t have to—” He begins and ends there. He folds his hands and a microscopic shard of glass shrieks beneath his skin. It feels about right. “I don’t know,” he tells her. It’s the most honest thing that’s made it past his lips in weeks. She is eighteen and going to college more or less where she likes. He is so much older than eighteen but he might not have been this stupid since then. He might have been eighteen the last time everything hurt this badly. “I don’t know what’s going on with me.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The most tragic story I have ever written—neglected ice cream. Hmmm.


	22. Rhizome—Undead Again (4 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kyle Jennings bothers her. He doesn’t bug her. Castle is still the leading man in that role. For the moment, at least. For the moment. But Kyle Jennings, the fact of him out of make-up and costume, off Perlmutter’s autopsy table, bothers her. He disrupts the point of view she’s been holding on to for dear life these last few weeks.

Kyle Jennings bothers her. He doesn’t _bug_ her. Castle is still the leading man in that role. For the moment, at least. For the moment. But Kyle Jennings, the fact of him out of make-up and costume, off Perlmutter’s autopsy table, _bothers_ her. He disrupts the point of view she’s been holding on to for dear life these last few weeks.

He is not Rhett, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, who has gone into who knows how much student loan debt, not just to craft some kind of intellectual justification for his eternal childhood, but to make himself the poster boy for postmodern life, in general. He’s not Paul, an apparent stoner for life, who’ll probably drift right through his “adulthood” and on into old age. 

Kyle Jennings is a normal man with a normal job—with what, frankly, sounds like a deadly boring job—who happens to have a slightly oddball, moderately expensive hobby. But his home, his finances, his friends, his life, they’re all normal. His reaction to the revelation that he is almost certainly responsible for a homicide he claims to have no memory of committing is normal, if the word even applies in such a bizarre situation. 

Men who play ludicrously complicated games of tag, who play dress-up in costumes that would probably consume a good chunk of her monthly salary, should not be capable of functioning in the real world as Kyle Jenkins seems to be. They should be impossible misfits, losers she sees across the interrogation table, because they always wind up a person of interest in some crime or another. They should be oversized little boys, all hormones and impulse, and anyone who trusts them to be more—to _ever_ be more—does so at their peril. 

They should be the thing—the one, blindingly obvious thing—you always knew they were. You fucking _knew_ it, and as painful as that truth is, it’s at least simple. 

But Kyle Jennings is not simple. Even his zombie alter ego—what draws him to the game—doesn’t seem to be simple. That alone bothers her, and what’s worse is that she believes him. She watches him carefully as he takes the absolutely correct amount of time to glance at David Locke’s photo and conclude he’s never seen the man. She registers his anxiety and confusion, but there’s nothing to indicate that he’s eliding details or flat out covering anything up. 

She feels her cop sense do a flip-flop of surprise at the way he doesn’t bullshit at all. His gaze fixes on the screen capture of his costumed self. She sees his injured hands clench and unclench as though he’s reminding himself of the fact of the cuts and bruises. He makes his devastated, yet unadorned reply— _Yes, that’s me_ —and _s_ he believes, without reservation, that he has no memory of what transpired in the parking lot of David Locke’s firm. 

But Castle does not believe. 

It happens in an instant. She thinks of a foosball table, with its lines of weighted figures moving side to side as one, rearing back and shooting their feet forward in concert. She thinks of being five or six, of her grandfather lifting her up above a crowd of bigger kids so she could see the inner workings of a series of giant Rube Goldberg machines. The row of little men spins wildly. The sliver ball spirals down the ramp and there’s the drawn-out sizzle of dominos falling. 

Castle does not believe, and in an instant, she connects the dots to Bobby Lopez, to her belief, without reservation, that the little shit was lying, to the abandoned cup of coffee on her desk. That part is simple—how it happened, when it happened, _what_ happened. 

Why it happened—why it has been happening and is _still_ happening right here in this hospital hallway—is not simple at all. 

He is an oversized little boy with enough money that he doesn’t have to be a misfit. He is all hormones and impulse, and he’s _mean._ He is what she knew him to be when she scoped him out from the margins of that book party four years ago. He’s a man who signs chests with an air of _noblesse oblige_ and believes his own hype. 

That’s the simple explanation she’s dug her fingernails into through flight attendants and flirtations with the dark side. It’s the Occam’s Razor she’s been gladly cutting herself on for weeks. It’s the quick and dirty, miserably painful, eleventh hour reveal that has been, in a terrible way, a relief, because she almost certainly can’t do this—she can’t be more, and thank God, he’s not worth it anyway. 

But he’s looking her in the eye now. He is squaring his shoulders and he is angry, he is _hurt_. He’s been mean, he’s lived down to the expectations she’s always been quick to voice, and it’s not that these last few weeks—who he has seemed to be—are her fault, but it’s not without explanation, either. It was never so simple as something inevitable.

It all happens in an instant, and then the instant is over. Perlmutter is there. Tom Williams is simple, exactly what everyone except his fiancée can see he is, and Kyle Jennings is putting away childish things. It’s a shame, really. It’s a shame for so many complicated reasons. 

But it serves its purpose—this thing that is more complicated and bothersome than it should be. She talks and he listens. She realizes all that he doesn’t know—all that he had no way of knowing—and just like that, the sting of the lone, pernicious thing he did know is all but gone. 

She wants him around. 

He’d like to stay. 

And in honor of the bothersome Kyle Jennings in all his contradictory glory, she smiles and tells him in all honesty— _I don’t know. I kind of think that the zombie make-up suits you, Castle._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Costumes. Hmmm. 


	23. Care—Always (4 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He is a life-long fan of horror movies. He knows their structure inside and out. And yet, he has no inking that morning in the alley when he takes a deep breath and asks her on a movie date. He has no inkling that this is the idyllic Act I. 

He is a life-long fan of horror movies. He knows their structure inside and out. And yet, he has no inking that morning in the alley when he takes a deep breath and asks her on a movie date. He has no inkling that this is the idyllic Act I. 

The fresh wounds, when they come, are shocking. They are devastating against the backdrop of the cautious hope he has been sheltering so carefully since they talked in the veiled, sidelong way that’s endearing because it’s so quintessentially them, and maddening because it has come, as it has time and time again, after they had wounded one another so deeply, so unnecessarily. 

And now, here they are—fresh wounds that startle him to his core. He—his lie—has kept her living in fear for her life—for the lives of the people she loves—for damned near a year. She has been working honestly, earnestly, alone on breaking down the wall around her heart and mind, all the while living in fear. He’s been the architect of her suffering. 

He’s been the architect of his own, because how could she possibly confront the feelings he has for her—the feelings she has for him—in the shadow of that fear? How could she possibly have faced, let alone acted upon, his deathbed admission when every night she’s gone to sleep wondering if tomorrow might be the day they came for her, came for every person they knew to be dear to her? 

These are not fresh wounds for her. That’s another terrible blow in itself. When all hope of a reprieve is lost—when she looks to him in the moment Esposito reveals that Orlando Costas died grappling with the man who shot her—he sees the history of them written in the wide-eyed fear she cannot disguise. He sees—indelibly written on her face—every morning she has awoken, wondering how she is still alive, and he knows he has no right to be shocked. 

With his stomach dropping away, he sees how these wounds have festered in her. The vicious tack she takes with Marisol Castañeda—painting vivid, merciless pictures, threatening the woman’s child—is sickening. It is terrifying how quickly this is carrying her away from the things he knows to be the essence of her—compassion, empathy, an absolutely steady moral compass. It’s terrifying to think that he is the one who might have dealt the killing blow to the woman she was always meant to be. 

And then it’s Smith who wields the lash. _I can’t control the situation if you can’t control her_. He has dealt in metaphors all these months. He’s spoken of steering, of sheltering, of protecting her from her own worst instincts, of giving her a respite from the burden she has carried alone for so long. He’s soothed himself with the idea that it’s a sin of omission. 

But control is the right word. It is the brutal truth of what he has been doing, and the worst of it is, he knows he would keep on doing it if that were an option. Festering wounds and all, he would make the same choice in the moment, he would keep on making it to keep her in the world. 

If it were an option. 

But it isn’t any longer. It isn’t, and confrontation is worse than he imagined. His own recent wounds have barely begun to heal, and she rakes them bloody. She is every bit as vicious with him as she has so recently been with the woman Orlando Costas left behind. She looks at him and wonders only what she can extract from him to feed the hunger that drives her now. And he knows—he knows in some recently awakened part of himself—that he is reaping what he has sown. 

But her eyes are flat and black and ghastly as she says she does not believe he loves her, has never believed, will never believe. It’s _her_ killing blow. It is, in that moment, the death of the man he has grown towards in the light of her presence, the death of the man he could not have conceived of four years ago. 

He leaves her. 

It is a sentence without meaning. There is no _he_ , there is no _her_ , not any more. The wounds are too significant, too calamitous for either one of them to go on. 

**************************

She comes to him, a woman reborn. She comes to him with her scars unabashedly on display—the ones he knows about, the ones he has cast as things of abject horror in his imagination, the ones whose size and shape and meaning his imagination has entirely failed to capture. 

She comes to him, and the healing he experiences in seeing, in letting her eager, welcoming touch guide his through the history of all she has survived, is indescribable. It would be, but he is a man reborn, too, and his words cannot possibly fail him on the doorstep of all they will be. In the confines of his mind, in the resonant buzz of his lips against every millimeter of terrain each scar covers, he speaks them, he knows them, he takes their power for his own. 

She nods and gasps and glares as his words dive and roll and run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous. She grows jealous of her scars, impatient and resentful of the attention he lavishes on them. She tugs at his hair, at his ear, and the sharp, no-nonsense pain calls up a joyful, weak-kneed laugh and the memory of the early days of loving her. 

She turns the tables, pinning his body triumphantly beneath her own. She rises tall above him and lightning sheathes her body in blue. She turns the page and devours the story of _his_ body, _his_ scars. She outlines with her teeth, sharp dotted lines, and flicks her tongue over topography that is ancient, that is recent, that lies before her in this new, unwritten era. 

She laughs and grumbles her way through the ones she knows. She interrogates him about the ones she doesn’t, and face-down beneath her, he laughs and rises up to confess, to tell his tall tales.

She is, he is, a book mutually devoured. She is, he is, a thrilling story, immediately beloved, that they close the first time with sighs of exhausted satisfaction, with the shimmering, insistent desire to begin again soon— _soon—_ but for now, he traces, she traces, the passages most beloved. 

He sees, though. Even in the insistent act of facing the scars she has carried, he has imagined, he sees the alarming filigree of fresh wounds that mottle and score her skin. Fresh wounds. Her head bows. She is still beneath the almost-sweep of his fingers, the wordless, unhurried exploration of his lips, his tongue, the rough of his cheek. 

“Kate,” he says when one infinity, at least, has passed. “Kate.” 

She lifts her chin. The heel of his hand rests just shy of particularly wicked bruise rising along the path of her ribs. She’s in pain. She has to be in so much fresh, immediate pain and the realization wants to let this moment turn to sorrow, to regret, to a pouring fourth of apologies, but her lips catch his, his lips catch hers. 

“Let’s take care of these,” he murmurs. His attention travels the outline of scrapes and swellings and probably a future scar or two. “Let’s take care of you.” 

She is gruff and grumbling as she lets him lead her into the bathroom. She shies from the mirror, and he hesitates with his hand on the light switch. He makes a judgment call in the low spill of light from the bedroom—she is battered from head to toe, but there’s nothing he can see that looks serious.

“Wait right here,” he says low in her ear. He skims his palms ever so lightly down her arms, gratified at the shiver that ripples over her marred skin. He hunts up the fireplace matches on the shelf above the tub and strikes one on the side of the box. He touches the flame to the wick of the first of the candles on the vanity. 

It illuminates them both as it flares to life. Her shoulders sag with pain and weariness, but her mouth half curves up in a wicked smile. “Should I even ask?”  
  
He preens. He rolls his shoulders back and puffs out his chest. “I think the candlelight speaks for itself.” 

She laughs softly. He turns to gather her to him. His fingers graze a raw place, a tender place, a wounded place. She hisses and draws back. “Castle!” 

“Sorry,” he brushes his cheek over a smooth expanse of skin at the apex of her shoulder. “Sorry, sorry. I’ll be careful.” 

“Careful,” she says, grumbling again as she buries her face against his neck. She lets out a shuddering sigh. Her fingers curl hard into his arms as she clings to him with desire, with weariness, with wounds that need tending. “You’re bad at careful.” 

“Not with you,” he says. He turns her body and eases her up to sit on the counter. He kneels, coaxing her thighs apart to begin his work. He feathers a kiss over a bruise blooming on the inside of her knee. She inhales sharply. Her fingers bury themselves, none too gently, in his hair. “I promise, Kate. Not with you.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wounds. Hmmm. A gross note to end on, but I think this is it.


End file.
